


To Catch a Husband

by mustinvestigate



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Backstory, College, Developing Relationship, Eventual Smut, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Infidelity, Pre-Canon, Pre-War, Unreliable Narrator, anti-relationship goals, atompunk, jerkface POV, toxic social mores, virgin/whore complex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2019-09-28 01:34:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17173334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustinvestigate/pseuds/mustinvestigate
Summary: There's ill advised flirtations and bad relationships a-plenty in any given freshmen year, but it takes a special pair of chuckleheads to conceive a more dire threat to humanity than nuclear annihilation.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, "To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job."

“Bridges, bridges, bridges,” Professor “No Mercy” Mercer sighs, strolling past the front-row desks, hands clasped behind his back like he’s crossing one of his students’ designs on a find summer evening. His shoulder drags on the blackboard when he turns, the tweed wiping out a span on his Longfellow Bridge diagram and smearing the scrawled “compression vs tension forces!” into illegibility. “Every engineering student’s dream is to design a bridge.”

That’s never been Nate’s dream, but as he turns his notebook to erase lines, replace them with sturdier, higher beams, he thinks it’d be a fine diversion on the way. There’s a grace to these shapes he’ll never find in rotor blueprints, like spun silk on the wind, shadowed in metal and rock.

“Only civil engineers design bridges, not architects.” He points to Nate’s roommate Ari, then at Nate. “Not mechanical engineers. And certainly…”

He pauses dramatically, brushing at the chalk dust on his knuckles. Ari tenses, tapping his pencil on the desk like a woodpecker. As Nate watches, one of his short, brutally brylcreem’ed curls works free of formation, nestling in a bead of sweat on his forehead.

“Certainly not plumbers.”

Ari’s girlfriend doesn’t look up from her own notes, wrinkling her long, sharp nose thoughtfully. Only a twitch of her foot, covered by uncrossing her legs and re-crossing them at the ankles, betrays her nerves when she replies, “How about Supreme Court justices?”

No Mercy only chuckles and turns her notebook so he can inspect her design, nodding and moving on to check Ari’s. “And how many civil engineers get the chance to build a single bridge, would you guess?”

He picks up Nate’s notebook and, when no one else in the class volunteers, glares at Nate over his bifocals. “Hmmm?”

There’s even chalk dust in the short bristles of No Mercy’s sideburns, Nate notices, opening his mouth to take a guess.

“One in five,” Ari pipes up, then shrugs. “I – I read ahead in the extra credit assignments.”

“One in five design major highway extensions,” No Mercy glowers. “With bridges, it’s only fifteen percent. You did not read closely enough.”

“I plan on blowing up quite a few bridges.” Nate grins, grabbing their professor’s attention before Ari’s ruddy face actually goes nuclear. “D’you think that’d get me a foot in the door on replacing one or two?”

“No, Mr Freis, I do not.” No Mercy runs a finger along Nate’s diagram, mumbling as he reads. “Dead load…live load…snow load, good…earthquake load? Do you believe Boston’s estimated tectonic activity is due a significant regrade in the near future?”

It was in the textbook, that’s all, but damn if he’ll tell No Mercy that. “I thought it’d be more useful to design something that could be built anywhere in the world, with minimal adjustments. But, heck, if you want to limit yourself to Boston, go off, I guess.”

Ari’s girlfriend coughs, crossing her ankles again. Ari himself’s gone from red to white, gripping his pencil so hard Nate’s surprised it doesn’t snap. Someone in the back of the room titters.

“You missed the wind load in your calculations,” No Mercy replies mildly. “In an exam, you’d also miss five points for that.”

“Yes, sir,” Nate responds reflexively, willing his heart to start beating again.

“You plan to use steel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And yet Miss Esposito and Mr Blum have chosen concrete.”

The numbers pop obediently to the front of his brain. “Steel has a tensile strength of 50k pounds per square inch. Concrete’s 5k if you’re lucky.”

“And stronger is better?”

“Of course!”

“Not here,” Ari’s girlfriend jumps in. “Concrete’s more stable, given the temperature variance and humidity.”

“Yeah, steel’d be more expensive in the first place, and then maintaining it against rust and wear and –” Ari adds eagerly.

“It’d be our very own Firth of Forth,” his girlfriend finishes.

“And the last thing Boston needs is a brace of bagpipers clogging up the river,” Nate grumbles in abject humiliation, and she’s the only student who laughs.

“Are you three quite finished?” No Mercy nods as they shrink back in the seats. “You’re in a study group together, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

The good ol’ scholarship gang, him and Ari and Ted and their girls, all desperate for a GPA that’ll earn them next semester’s tuition check, but No Mercy doesn’t need to know that. As if he can’t taste the blood in the water, doesn’t already have them marked for execution before midterms. Mercer’s Engineering 101 requires at least a B for students to climb any higher in Massachusetts Bay’s elite program, and that’s fighting a wicked curve of classmates who’d commit hari-kari before bringing home anything less than a hundred in every subject.

“If the rest of you have any hope of passing my class, you’d do well to join them.” He turns away from the class and erases half his bridge, scrawling “CUBC” in the empty space. “Now, who else did the reading and can tell me the essential elements of the Commonwealth Uniform Building Code…”

Ari taps his shoulder, whispering, “Thanks, bud. I owe you big.”

He can’t help looking past him, to his girlfriend, bracing himself for a well-earned smirk. But she only opens her eyes wide, mouthing “whew!”, before raising her hand.

* * *

“It’s going great, Daddy-O.”

Nate tries to simultaneously project impenetrable confidence and keep his voice down so the entire hall doesn’t get to listen in as he reports to his CO, Professor Gunther Freis, “Dad” to his only begotten son and possibly in his favorite students’ fondest, furtive, dreams.

“Started on the hooch a little early today, son?”

Apparently, he didn’t quite stick the landing on that one.

He lowers his voice and turns to face the wall, leaning on the monstrous dorm phone. “Not a drop.”

“How did you do on the Whitman essay?”

There’s phone messages and graffiti scrawled into the wall that’ve got to go back to the Revolutionary War. “Ninety-six. I told you –”

“And why wasn’t it a hundred?”

Nate closes his eyes, picturing a pretty girl with corkscrew curls in a ponytail carving “MB + WvE” into the wall right where he’s standing, now a dowdy grandmother of sixteen who’d happily drown “WvE” in their kitchen sink if he ever bothered to venture home from the corner bar.

“Because Spencer’s wrong about commas. I’m not going to stop using an Oxford comma just because she went to Cambridge and thinks she’s Jane Austin.”

“Son, it’s English 101. It’s an easy A.”

“I know, it’s –”

“That’s four points farther away from a 4-point-oh.”

“But it’s –”

“You can use Oxford commas to your heart’s content in your letters home. Right now, you keep that GPA up every single chance you get.”

“I…” The fire door to the stairwell down the hall opens. He knows it’s Ari’s girlfriend without looking. She’s the only idiot who walks up three floors to their dorm room, insisting the elevator’s not up to standard. Right, because a plumber’s daughter knows better than the qualified engineer who signed the inspection certificate in the lobby. “Yes, sir. You’re right, sir.”

He opens his eyes anyway to watch her approach, too-tight pencil skirt clinging to her thick thighs, too-loose cardigan over a threadbare blouse, ugly saddle shoes clomping on the thin carpet. He nods when she waves and points to their door, covering the receiver to whisper, “Go on, Galena’s already here.”

“Is that Miss Villegas?”

“No, Dad, that’s Miss Esposito.”

“Hullo, Professor Freis,” she calls toward the phone as she opens the door, then as it swings closed behind her, “Hi Lena!”

“Ari’s girl,” Nate clarifies, just so his dad doesn’t get any ideas. “We’re all prepping for Monday’s calc quiz.”

“On a Friday night? Well, son…” He coughs, then continues weakly, “Keep this up, and you might be picking up a mitt this spring after all.”

His heart does a happy little skip at the thought of stepping back onto the pitcher’s mound – although, given the competition will be a lot stiffer than Anne Arundel High’s senior cohort, he might be lucky to get into the dugout as ballboy – but then the old man’s cough doesn’t ease off.

“You ok, Dad?”

“Fine, fine.” He clears his throat. “The Glovers are burning leaves out back.”

“Of course they are.” Nate hesitates, then asks, “You get your shot today?”

Pernicious anaemia had kept the old man out of the army, back when he was Nate’s age. He’d taken pills as long as Nate could remember, and a few years ago added a weekly shot to his regimen. Then a twice-weekly shot. Then every other day…

They were just vitamins, he’d told Nate. Faster to jab them in his arm than chew on a pill – he’s a busy man! Nothing to worry about.

“Your mother sends her love,” his father responds sharply. “She’s in D.C. this weekend for her fundraiser.”

“That’s the…” Nate mentally flips through his mother’s various charity committees and takes a shot on her most recent chairwomanship. “The _USS Eton Atoll_ Widows & Orphans Fund, right?”

“They’re dedicating the memorial tomorrow.” That’s his professor voice now – deep, solemn, slightly full of himself – but there’s the faintest ring of approval underneath that. “So I’m roughing it tonight, without her. That’s my little sacrifice to the cause.”

Nate can picture it, the old man heating up a can of beanie weenies on the stove, lining up bottles of gin, vermouth, and olives, and wonders why he isn’t also in the capital. A new memorial for a fresh Navy disaster…he’s passing up the chance at a whole mall full of primary sources. Why? “Still, it’s got to beat canteen food.”

“You’ll remember that canteen food like a lost sweetheart when you taste the slop they serve in basic. And the memory of _that_ slop’ll bring a tear to your eye when you’re sharing an MRE four ways out in the field.”

The old man laughs, sounding stronger. Maybe it was just leaf smoke setting off his cough, and maybe another chapter deadline’s chained him to his typewriter at home. Anyway – Nate checks his watch – his three minutes are almost up.

“Okay Dad. Tell Mom I love her, too.”

“I will. Until next week, son. Make us proud.”

“Always.”

The girls are sprawled out on Ari’s bed, books propped higgledy-piggledy on the unmade blankets. They never sit on his side, despite the shelf of reference books and hospital corners keeping _his_ sheets tight and smooth. Maybe Ari’s rumpled space radiates the same easy warmth of the fellow who dens there.

“Come to momma,” Ari’s girlfriend croons, fishing a fifth of rye from under his pillow.

Or maybe it’s the fully-stocked bar hidden in the sheets.

Galena pops a couple of mentats from the pack in her purse and passes it around after the bottle, blushing when he blows her a kiss. “Where’s Ari?”

“The gym. Where else?” Nate picks up the folded newspaper on Ari’s desk, hoping there’ll be an article about the new monument. It’s Monday’s edition, though, the front page dominated by General Chase’s admission that blasting the Reds out of Anchorage may take slightly longer than his original eight-week timeline, nine months now since Chinese troops set foot on American soil.

“He wanted me to check his derivatives worksheet.”

Nate drops the paper on his roommate’s overflowing trash bin, finds the homework stuffed in Ari’s textbook and settles cross-legged on the floor, comparing Ari’s work to his. “It looks pretty good.”

“Let me see it.”

Galena smooths out the creases in the paper and frowns. “Ari just can _not_ grasp constant functions.”

And she’s off, circling and scribbling and nibbling on her lip, helping Ari’s girl with the slope of her tangents, correcting Nate’s formula after a casual glance over his shoulder. She’s wasting her time in Calc 101, but since the university won’t accept “learned at my father’s elbow” as class credit, her study group reaps the rewards of her boredom.

She’s not one of them, really – in fact, the closest proximity she’s ever had to a scholarship is the healthy donation her parents make to their alma mater’s endowment every year. They’d probably paid all four years in one check just to save wear and tear on the accountant’s pen nib. It doesn’t matter if she walks the boards as valedictorian or barely scrapes a 2.0, since she and her big brother have good jobs waiting for them in Villegas Chemurgic Corp, but she’s gunning for that accolade like her future depends on it, all the same.

Galena’s too good for them, if he’s honest…she’s almost too good for him. She studies with his gang because they’re dating – exclusively, since last week! – and they’re only dating because he had years to charm her, thrown together at country club cotillions and their parents’ occasional gettogethers. Years in which – he grins to himself at his own foolishness – he and her brother Lonny ditched her to go fishing in the river out back or smoke behind the stables, leaving her to sit primly just out of earshot, pert little nose buried in a book, sleek black hair brushing those dimpled cheeks…

“How’s your dad?”

He drags his attention away from Galena’s adorably scrunched expression, trying not to wince as he settles on her friend. She’s not an ogre, exactly, just a cursed with a tank of a face half-heartedly softened with a little lipstick and blush, and her hair’s only sort of held back in a bun, pinned with a pencil he’d bet good money she’s forgotten she put there – given she’s doing her calc homework in pen. “He’s fine.”

“How’s his semester going?” she persists. “He teaches history, right?”

“He’s on sabbatical.”

“Oh. That’s nice for him.”

He wracks his brain for a response, since they’re now having a conversation, apparently, for some reason. “Your…mother, she was in town last week, right?”

“Testifying,” she nods. “She was attached to the task force investigating that speakeasy in Concord, the one that Eddie Winter supposedly uses to launder a lot of his black-market funds?”

She makes bunny ears with her fingers around the word “supposedly” and rolls her eyes.

“They didn’t get Winter, but they did hook one of his ‘alleged’ lieutenants, and that rat’s likely to roll over at least a little to knock a few years off his sentence.” She laughs and raises two fists. “Or just to never run into Ma in a dark warehouse ever again.”

“Oh. Good.”

She drops her fists into her lap and stares at them, one corner of her mouth bunching up as Galena shifts on the bed, sitting up and farther away. “Anyway, uh, we went to lunch by the courtroom while they were on recess.”

Nate stands and flicks on the radio to break up the awkward silence a little, wrinkling his nose at the insipid blah-de-blah-cottage-built-for-two crap that limps out of the speaker.

“Oh, this one’s lovely,” Galena exclaims.

Nora flips ahead in the textbook. “I…I’m not one for music, really.”

“Where’d you go out for lunch?” Galena backtracks smoothly.

“Oh, the Tip Tap – you remember, Ari’s new spiritual home?” She smiles a little, probably remembering their first outing all together downtown, how lost they’d been before stumbling on the friendly little pub with a generous interpretation of a pint. “Ma liked it a lot.”

“More importantly, how’d she like Ari?”

“Ari?”

“Of course you introduced them. Right?”

“Uh, no.” She looks down at her hands again, frowning like she’s actually parsing the complicated graph near the very end of the book. “My mother’s mealtime small talk can be a little…graphic…for anyone who hasn’t grown up around cops.”

“Well, is he going home with you for Thanksgiving? Or are you meeting his family then?” Galena closes her book with a snap and reaches for the bottle of rye. “You’re not just going to descend on them some weekend with a ring on your finger and the total stranger who put it there?”

She sets her textbook aside and twiddles her fingers for a moment before crossing to the radio and fiddling with the dial. “Um…no. No. Definitely not.”

Galena whispers to Nate under the cover of static, “She is so weird sometimes.”

He nods, freezing at the little tilt of the other girl’s head, the hesitation before she turns the dial again. Nate shoots a guilty look at Galena, but her attention’s all on him, lifting his arm so she can snuggle close to his side.

The radio settles on a station playing something upbeat, mercifully instrumental.

“I don’t plan to ever get married, actually.” She picks up her worksheet again like she hasn’t just lobbed an atom bomb into the conversation.

“Oh.” Galena stiffens under Nate’s arm. “But…you and Ari, you’re practically joined at the hip.”

“Ari’s a lovely fellow.” She scribbles out a tangent calculation and re-writes it more firmly. “But I’m here to get my Bachelor’s, not an M-R-S degree.”

“Oh,” Galena says again and elbows Nate in the side, but he’s saved by the bell, or more accurately their door flying open and Ari tumbling in with Ted, those two muscleheads pushing everything out of the little dorm room that’s not their shouting and aura of good healthy sweat.

“Hello, baby,” Ari exclaims and spins his girl in a tight circle, more or less in time to the music, and she laughs like she’s happy to see him. He kisses her cheek, their frowsy curls mingling so it’s impossible to tell where he ends and she begins.

Galena stands, smoothing her skirt, and gives him a scandalised look with her back turned to the spectacle. _Poor Ari_ , she mouths.

“What’d we miss?” Ari asks, flopping out on Nate’s bed.

“Only everything that’ll be on the quiz,” his girl teases, handing him her textbook. “Crack that book, young man, or it’s back to Hoboken by Christmas.”

“Shove over,” Ted demands, taking Nate’s worksheet and sandwiching it with his own on his knee.

Nate obeys, sitting back against the narrow headboard, finding a stray pack of cigarettes under his knee and tossing it to their little shared bureau. He answers Ted’s questions with half his brain, mostly watching Ari cuddle up with a girl who presses her cheek to his shoulder, cups his knee like she owns it, and has no intention of ever making an honest man out of him.

Too soon, Galena’s yawning and checking her watch. “Almost curfew. Got to run home before we turn into pumpkins.”

They pull their belongings together and set off, elbows linked, and watching them Nate thinks (not for the first time), _Beauty and the Beast_. It’s not fair, not really – Galena’s so lovely and polished she’d put anyone in the shade, let alone a girl who’d prefer snaking drains to perusing the new autumn line at Fallon’s – but, well. Maybe not a beast, per se, but she’s certainly not a lady.

“How’s it going with you two?” he asks after lights out, when the rustle of sheets and furtive cigarette glow assures him his roommate’s still in the land of the living.

“Great!”

“Really?”

“You have no idea.”

He really doesn’t. It’s not like his heart’s totally set on Galena, but he can picture a future with her in it. Big dinners in his parent’s pretty house by the water. Their mothers playing croquet with grandchildren in their Sunday best after church, sharing gossip and donor lists. The general, the professor and the agri-chem genius inside, cigars smouldering as they complain about tightwad senators strangling the Pentagon’s R&D budget with a goddamn war on. Galena on the lawn, the children’s raven-haired heads like stair steps as they line up for photos that he’ll keep in the safest part of his rucksack out in the field, counting the days until his next furlough home. He and Lena make sense together. They fit.

Just like Ari makes sense with a tough, practical girl, someone to blast him out of the clouds, push him to make something of his life. Why’s she wasting his time, if she doesn’t see that?

Does she think she can do better?

Bedsprings squeak and the ember dances in the gloom. “She’s everything my dad ever warned me about Catholic girls, and thank god for it.”

“Oh.” There’s a wrinkle he hadn’t considered. “You can’t bring home a girl who isn’t Jewish?”

“Eh. I guess I could.” He can hear Ari’s expressive shrug, picture his cheeky pooched-out lip. “He wouldn’t be thrilled, but he wouldn’t disown me or anything.”

“So he’d come around?” Nate tries. “Eventually?”

Ari laughs. “I don’t really give a shit what my dad thinks.”

Nate blinks into the darkness, letting that concept sink in slowly.

“He’s not taking her out,” Ari continues. “His heart couldn’t take it, if he was. Man. Nora, she’s just the tops.”

“Well, that’s…great. Great.” He tries to picture introducing his parents to a girl like her: _Mom, Dad, this is the girl I’m gonna marry. She’s Catholic, but don’t let that put you off. And don’t mind the stink, either, that’s just her dad’s shop car. Well, it’s a van. And her mom’s brought some neat-o crime scene photos to pass around at dinner…_

“She’s no damn tease, either. Put out on the second date.”

“Oh,” Nate says again, fumbling for a verbal ripcord that’ll parachute him out of the conversation.

“Girl knows what she wants, and it’s me.” He chuckles. “Every bit a’me.”

He wonders if Ari’d be fooled by sudden burst of snoring.

“How ‘bout you and Lena, eh?”

“Good, good.” Nate rolls over, bouncing his butt so the springs groan, and hopes Ari’ll take the hint.

“You sealed the deal, yet?”

Nate winces, but admits to himself, _Well I did open this door._ “Not as such, no.”

“Well, Lena’s a nice girl.” Ari stubs the cigarette out on the wall. There’s a moist ping as he flicks it into the trash bin. “You poor son of a bitch.”

“We’ve done some things,” Nate retorts, stung, then guiltily hopes Ari won’t want a full report. Because he’ll tell him, just so Ari doesn’t shop it around he’s a wet end.

“Nora’s roommate’s pre-med,” Ari continues instead. “So she lives at the library. And most weekends, she volunteers at her uncle’s vet clinic. Leaves us our own little private lovenest almost any time we want.”

“You should invite her to join the study group,” Nate attempts, desperate to derail Ari’s train of conversation. “She sounds like our kind of people.”

“She really is,” Ari agrees. “Plus, she could get her hands on horse tranquilisers. Then, all we’d need’s a hotplate and rubbing alcohol to make daytripper.”

“Great, great.” Those two probably deserve each other, Nate decides, shoving his head under the pillow.


	2. Chapter 2

The birds aren’t even up when Nate leaves the dorm, after trying twice to roll Ari out of bed. So Nate reports on time for ROTC manoeuvres, which is why he’s field-stripping and rebuilding a laser rifle when Ari’s girl crosses the quad, but Ari’s stuck in his fifth of fifty wind sprints in full gear up the main hall steps.

Nate doesn’t even recognise her until she waves in response to Ari’s breathless, shouted greeting. Seen from the corner of his eye, he’d assumed the maintenance crew was going about their business, given her dungarees and sturdy boots. When she turns her head to check for their supervisor, he sees her hair stuffed through the gap in the back of her Red Sox cap in a rough ponytail, like a waterfall frothed up in high wind.

“Hullo, Nate.” She frowns. “You look so different in your uniform.”

He pulls himself up straight. “Better get used to it.”

She watches him strip the rifle for a minute, hands in her pockets against the early-morning chill.

“Where are you off to so early?”

“Home.” She checks her watch. “The 7:28 out of Newmarket.”

“You’d better hurry, if you’re walking.”

“Mm-hmm.”

She makes no move to go, eyes following Ari up and down the steps.

“What takes you home?”

“Laundry.” She shifts the heavy backpack on her shoulder, and he laughs.

“Expensive trip, just for free laundry.”

“Pop needs a hand in the store, too.” She looks down at her clothes.

“You going to be – " He almost finishes _swimming in shit_ but bites his tongue just in time. “Uh, fixing any leaks?”

“I’m not that lucky.” She goes back to watching Ari. “He’s got his apprentice for any callouts. I’ll be stuck in back all day, running inventory.”

“He can’t do that himself?” Nate feels just a touch of a blush pricking his cheeks when she frowns again. “It’s almost midterms.”

She presses her lips together before answering. “He’s up to bid on a big municipal contract. So, uh…he needs to know exactly what he can offer up front.”

It’d be a stupid thing to lie about, and he doesn’t think she is, exactly. Just threading a very narrow path through the truth, with big thorny branches catching her tongue.

“Cadet Freis!”

Nate jumps up like his commander stuffed a ramrod up his ass. “Yes, sir?”

“Why don’t you finish rebuilding that rifle, and then join your friend on the steps over there?”

“Yes, sir!” Dammit.

“Unless you’re sure a well-exercised mouth is all you’ll need to thrash those Commies up in Anchorage, instead?”

“No, sir!”

“And Miss…Esposito, I believe?”

“Yes, sir?” Her response is less crisp, verging on insolence but not quite penetrating the border.

“We always have space in the ROTC programme for students who…” He pauses to take in her outfit, lingering on her boots. “Look more than capable of hauling fifty pounds of gear up those stairs.”

“Thank you, sir, for that kind offer, but I’m afraid I have a prior engagement to battle several long columns of numbers and, most likely, even longer columns of cockroaches.”

The commander’s lips twitch as she bends low in a sweeping curtsey, spreading imaginary skirts, and turns away with a little hop.

“Need anything from the outside world, Cadet Freis?” she calls over her shoulder. It’s almost a march, her shoulders stiff and square, but her hips sway like she’s already on that train.

“A carton of Greys!” he shouts, frantically jotting rifle parts together in the almost certainly vain hope his commander won’t double his wind sprints for lingering. “I’ll pay you back!”

“Yes, you will!”

* * *

Ari brings the carton (minus one pack) back with him to their dorm Sunday night, whistling through the front door 30 seconds before curfew would lock him out overnight. Nate takes a pack for himself and sits on the sill, blowing smoke out the window.

“What do I owe her?”

“Nada. I already reimbursed her.” Ari joins him by the window, tapping out another cigarette. “I guess we’ll just have to split the carton. You don’t mind?”

Of course he minds. “Nah. I should cut back, anyway. Those wind sprints hurt.”

“I hear you.” Ari smiles at his reflection in the glass, licks his finger, and smooths fine hairs back from his temples. “Hey, isn’t that your dad’s book?”

“One of them.” He closes it around his finger, holding his place, and lets Ari examine the cover.

“‘Ancient Tactics, Modern Warfare’. That’s…catchy?”

“It wasn’t a bestseller.” Nate flips it back open. “I never actually read it, not after a solid year of Dad and Grandpa arguing ancient Roman tactics over the dinner table. Could’ve plotted out Vercingetorix’s Gergovia campaign in my sleep.”

“And you’re not a history major, why?”

“Because I want to build a bridge.”

“Blow them up, you mean,” Ari snickers, but looks away as his reflected face in the window loses its mirth. “What…what d’you think it’ll be like, over there?”

“As if we’ll get to find out,” Nate snorts. “We’ll have whipped those pink kittens by summer. Four years from now, we’ll be cooling our heels in some cushy Beijing base – the only chance we’ll have at a purple heart is a too-burly geisha’s massage.”

“Geishas are Japanese,” Ari corrects, because of course he knows that. He chews on his lip, pretending to read the blurb on the back of Nate’s book, a glowing review from one of the General’s cronies, probably dictated over his two-star shoulder. “You’re probably right about the rest, though.”

“Grandpa’s told me all about it,” Nate offers, taking pity on him. “He says a battle’s scary, sure, that only an idiot wouldn’t be afraid, but you – you’ve got your buddies. When you train together, fight together, you’re closer than any family. You remind each other how important it is, how proud you are, and you carry each other forward no matter how many guns are pointed at you. It’s easy to be brave, then.”

“Hoo rah.” Ari take a long drag. “And when do the magic bullet-deflecting fairies drop in? Before or after the merciful nightingales with the bright red crosses on their please-god-let-them-be-ample bosoms?”

“They fly in on the USO plane with Jangles the Moon Monkey.”

Ari laughs and stubs out his cigarette, flicking the filter into the darkness. “G’night, G.I. Jamoke. I’m beat.”

Nate rolls his eyes and turns on the little light over his desk, picking up where he left off, with Boudica stomping toward Londinium with a horde of extremely pissed-off Iceni and Trinovantes. He looks at the accompanying photo, a grainy shot of the bronze queen astride her war chariot, arms raised to fling a spear past her galloping horses, for a very long time.

* * *

She’s working the front desk of the library when he goes to return the book.

“Hey, your hair!”

She touches the smooth swoop tucked behind her ear self-consciously. “I brought my hot comb up from home.”

She doesn’t ask if he likes it. Up close, he can see a fine ring of wild hairs all around her head that refused to bow to the iron. “It’s nice.”

“I guess so.” She turns the book to stamp it, pausing when she sees the cover. “Isn’t that your father? Or are there other Freises out there who also teach military history?”

“Just the one.” He takes the book back when she tries to move it onto her cart and opens it to the statue’s photograph. “You ever heard of Boudica? Big folk hero over in England.”

Her hair tickles his forehead when she leans over the page. “Is that Big Ben?”

“Yes. It’s on Westminster Bridge. It’s supposedly on the spot she was buried, when she lost to –”

She closes the book and adds it to her pile on the cart. “Galena’s at the usual table.”

He follows her to the reference stacks by the bubbler. “How’s, uh, how’s your dad? Think he has a good shot at that bid?”

She stretches to slot a book on gall wasps onto the top shelf. “He’ll get it.”

“He’s that sure?” Nate asks, picking up the next book on her pile.

“Pop has his ways and means.” She reaches past him when he holds it out, choosing one that she has to crouch low to shelve, behind the cart, and whispers, “I can’t talk when I’m working.”

He turns and almost bumps into a tiny old lady in a colorless cardigan with huge glasses resting on a chain about where her bosom use to be, recoiling instinctively. He turns back, raising the book still in his hand, and loudly announces, “Thank you, young lady, for your help with finding –”

For once, his brain moves faster than his mouth, and instead of reading the title he stutters, “th-this book, thank you, yes,” and scuttles to the safety of Galena’s side. She raises an eyebrow when he sets the book down and immediately covers it with the chemistry textbook she’s copying ion structures from, and then two books from his own bag just to be on the safe side. He lets her turn the stack so she can read the spine, knowing any more resistance will put off the inevitable by seconds, at best.

“Well.” She traces the worn letters with one immaculate red fingernail: Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. “You could’ve just asked.”

“Where’s the romance in that?”

* * *

“I’m dead. Kaput. That’s it. Say your goodbyes!”

Ari flings his paper, marred by a bright red “D”, on his desk and roots through his bedsheets for the half-bottle of bourbon that got him into this mess.

“Maybe you should’ve read the book before writing a paper on it,” Galena suggests gently.

“I read half of it!” Ari moans, cradling the bottle to his chest. “It’s basically camping. Guy has no money and roughs it in the woods – great! I did that every summer in scout camp.”

His girl gently pries the bottle away and hands it to Galena, settling on the bed next to him.

“My dad’s gonna kill me. I’m gonna lose my scholarship and have to go back to Hoboken with my tail between my legs, and then he’s going to kill me.”

“C’mere, baby.”

Ari doesn’t resist when she pulls him close, sliding bonelessly down her chest to hide his face in her lap.

Nate clears his throat.

She strokes his hair, running a thumb tenderly along the inside of his ear.

Nate clears his throat harder.

“He’s not going to kill you.” She twists to rest her cheek on his shoulder. Her hair falls over his chest like a dark, soft curtain. “You’re going to turn this around, get As on your term papers, and squeak past with a B overall.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” he whimpers into…well…into her crotch, not to put too fine a point on it. “I’m a fuck-up, Nor. I’m a fuck-up and everyone knows it.”

“You’re one of the smartest fellas I know,” she insists softly.

Nate tries to look away, but only finds their reflection in the mirror over their little corner sink. Galena tugs at his elbow.

“Let’s give them a little privacy.”

He nods like he’s reluctant to go, like he wants nothing more than to stay and comfort his good pal until he stops trying to re-enact his own birth in reverse. The fresh air out in the hallway tastes so good he’s got to suck in great gulping lungfuls, steering Lena toward the open space of the stairs rather than the stuffy old elevator. Outside’s even better, the last shreds of sunset light fading into deep blue pricked with stars, nothing between him and the sky but a few streaky clouds.

He follows Lena to the center of the quad, where the building lights barely reach, and wraps his sport coat around her shoulders before they lay back in the chilly grass.

“Poor Ari,” she whispers, once every trace of sunlight’s gone and the quad’s resident pigeons have been replaced by the occasional darting bat.

“He needed the wake-up call,” Nate tells her.

“Yes, but…still.”

“Still.”

He needs a tough, practical girl to keep him on the straight and narrow, obviously. But maybe…maybe not that girl. They’re clearly no good for each other.

Not like him and Galena.

He reaches around her, but when she cuddles close, digs in his jacket pocket instead for the little lump of metal he’s been carrying around. “Here.”

He holds his breath as she rolls it in her fingers and holds it up to the weak light of stars and Sedgwick Hall’s security lamp. “Your ROTC pin?”

“It’s too soon.”

She closes her fist when he moves to take it back. “It’s perfectly timed, Nate. My Nate.”

Her lips smile under his as he pins it to her sweater by touch, stabbing himself under the thumbnail on the first try and not feeling the pain even a little bit.

“This calls for a celebration,” she announces, pulling Ari’s bourbon from her purse.

“You stole that?” he laughs.

“Merely kept it out of his reach, so he couldn’t hurt himself anymore,” she replies primly, unscrewing the top and taking a healthy toot.

“You are so caring.” He throws back a slug himself, giddy with released nerves. “That’s what I love about you.”

She smiles again at that, and later he thinks that maybe her lips were a little tight, but that’s after they’ve killed another quarter of the bottle, holding each other and their breath when the 300-year-old security guard passes his first round without even looking across the dark quad, and once he’s gone they flatten a big sweep into the grass like giant windshield wipers. And later, drowsing in bed with only a haze of cigarette smoke and Ari’s congested snores to keep him company, he thinks too that it was fortunate, the chill of the ground and inevitable drizzle that kept them from doing anything they’d regret too soon. Before dozing off, his forgotten smoke burned to cold ash on his bedspread, he almost remembers (but smothers the thought before it gets a first cry out) that she didn’t say she loves him back.

* * *

“You changed your hair again.”

He follows her down the stacks, but this time doesn’t make the mistake of touching any books.

“Mm-hmm.” She pushes the cart ahead of her with one of those scuffed saddle shoes, slotting three anatomy texts in rapid succession.

“What’s the occasion?” he persists.

“You’re looking at it.” She touches her high curled bangs, patting non-existent stray hairs into place. The rest is twisted behind her ears, in a pretty braid that lays like an exotic fish on her pilled sweater neckline. “Claire asked Lena’s help to prepare for her date on Friday, and our cram session went right off the rails.”

“Claire?”

“My roommate? I just introduced you?” She gestures back toward their table. “She’s right over there, waiting for help with her Hawthorne essay?”

Nate glances back and notes that, indeed, the blonde so thin and pallid he’d checked for a scythe and pale horse tucked in the dorm hallway behind her also has her hair pulled into a sort of shape one might generously interpret as “done”. And so does Galena, in fact, although she always looks so good it didn’t stand out from any other day.

“Well, it looks great.”

She doesn’t thank him. Doesn’t say anything at all as she nudges the cart to the next stack.

“I never said thanks for the smokes.”

“Thank Ari,” she shrugs. “He paid for them.”

He wracks his brain for something else to say – anything to keep from facing his own half-done essay and Ari’s desperate questions.

She rescues him, even though she’s probably only talking to herself when she murmurs, “Although I am coming to hate the smell of them.”

“Really? Why?”

She kneels on the carpet to set a scattered bottom shelf to rights. “My dad smokes like a stack. Always has. And he’s always coughed, too, but lately…”

“You think he’s sick?”

She pauses with one hand on The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America, the red-winged blackbird on the cover looking affronted at the cheeky grope. “His people tend to drop dead of a massive coronary at 60. They don’t have a chance to get sick. And everyone at the funeral agrees it’s sad they’ll have to find a sub for the bowling tournament at such short notice, but hell, he had a good run.”

He smiles at her gallows humor, but can’t bring himself to respond in kind. “Maybe he should change brands. Try the one all those doctors recommend, instead.”

She shakes her head. “He’ll never listen. He’s a Morley man.”

He tries to take the empty cart from her but shrinks back, stung, at her sharp glare. She doesn’t complain when he tags along back to the front desk, though, or leans next to her as she logs on to the ancient computer. The clack of keys is almost soothing as she picks up one book after another, recording their return dates and filling up her cart again.

“My dad is sick.”

“I’m sorry?”

Nate takes a deep breath, wishing he could suck the words back along with it. “Diagnosed when he was my age, when he tried to enlist.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

Her hand hovers over the next book until he nods, assuring her he’s not going to collapse in a tsunami of sobs if she keeps working.

“It’s not inheritable, or anything. I was cleared by the ministry last year. They said I could fill all of Maryland with little Freises, if I wanted.”

She doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even look up from her book, and he feels the blood drain out of his face as he realises: maybe she wasn’t. Maybe something in her DNA profile got her bounced out of the gene pool, and that’s why she’ll never get married, not with the crappy selection of guys who’d take on a reject like that. He wonders if Ari knows – if Ari cares. He’s getting his right now, either way.

“Hmm? Oh, sorry, I missed that last bit – just, ugh, just look at this!”

She checks over her shoulder before showing him the flyleaf, now decorated with an amazingly detailed scribble of a smiling penis, with legs and arms and hands lifted up in two separate obscene gestures.

“In pen,” she hisses. “What kind of asshole…never mind. You were talking about something very personal and important while I was off in la-la land, I believe?”

He chuckles to cover his relief as she flings the book onto a shelf behind the desk. “Not so important. He’s okay, really. Just has to take his meds, and get lots of rest, and he’s fine.”

He picks at a crack in the desk’s varnish while she logs in another book.

“Except lately, he’s been taking it more and more. Says it’s just vitamins, but…”

The clacking of keys pauses.

“His condition, see, a lot of people end up with, well…” He swallows. “If he did have the big C, he wouldn’t tell me. Wouldn’t want it to distract me from my studies. No missing ROTC on weekends to come home, worrying when I ought to be studying, that kind of thing.”

He laughs self-consciously, lifting a big sliver of varnish off the wood. “I’ve got to live up to all my expectations, and all of his, too.”

She takes the sliver from him and taps it back into place, rubbing a thumb over the rough break, and whispers, “He’d be a bigger bastard than whoever drew a dong in a library book, to pull something like that. I don’t see it.”

They’re interrupted by a throat clearing that’s louder than a yodel down the Grand Canyon. Nate jumps a mile, then girds his loins to face…the gargoyle.

“Sorry, Mrs Aitcheson,” Nora mumbles.

“Miss Esposito…”

“Yes, Mrs Aitcheson, I know.”

“I assume you’ve clocked out, yes? You’re not paid to pitch woo at your boyfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Nate tries with a wide grin. “My girlfriend’s over there.”

He points at Galena, who looks up with alarm.

“So’s my boyfriend,” Nora pipes up. “He’s the pretty one.”

She wilts at her boss’s glare, then whispers, “There’s an illness in his family.”

The old bat softens just a little, like margarine in the sun, but still raises a warning finger. “Only this once, and only so long as you are working while you socialise.”

“Thank you, Mrs Aitcheson.”

“Yeah, thanks, Miz A,” Nate adds, almost blowing it, but after another glare she moves off like a U-boat in search of better torpedo targets.

“Dale Carnegie’s How to Make Friends and Influence People,” Nora whispers, chuckling shakily. “Give people the chance to do you a favour. I didn’t think it would actually work.”

“You’re brilliant,” he says. “I’m using that. I’m using that every day for the rest of my life.”

He moved out of the way when a stack of books with legs approaches the desk, watching as she thumps each with her stamp and smiles at the pigeon-chested little piss-ant like he’s a varsity hero as he staggers away. Ari waves from their table, offering a tentative thumbs-up, sagging a little when his girl points at the big clock and holds up all ten fingers.

“He’s a little better today,” Nate offers, lying through his teeth.

“Well, he’s sober so far, at least.” She sighs and picks up another return to log in, muttering, “God. Sometimes I feel less like his girlfriend than his womb, keeping him warm, secure, and wet.”

Nate snorts so loud it echoes across the stacks, and her hand flies to her mouth.

“I didn’t say that. Oh god, don’t tell him I said that. I didn’t mean it.”

He coughs, waving away Galena’s concerned expression from across the room. “I won’t. But I see your point.”

“No you don’t. Shut up.”

She pushes her cart so hard it rattles the whole way down the aisle, one back wheel wiggling crazily on the slick linoleum. Nate doesn’t even both to follow, this time, throwing himself into the chair next to Galena and opening his dog-eared copy of Twice-Told Tales.

“What the hell was that about?” Ari whispers.

“She’s just peeved her boss told her off because we were chatting for, what, a minute?” He flips through the book. “You’re doing ‘The Great Carbuncle’, right?”

The apparition of death scowls at him and hisses, “Don’t you pester her. She needs this job.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Not that bad.” Ari checks his watch again, tapping the face like that’ll make the minute hand rush on to his girl’s quitting time that much faster. “Her dad can always scrape up a little extra cash.”

“He’s got his ‘ways and means’?” Nate shoots off.

“Oh, you heard? Yeah, he’s some kinda…” Ari ducks his head guiltily as Nora turns a corner, jumping to sock a heavy encyclopedia volume on the highest shelf rather than walk ten feet to get the stepladder. “He’s a hothead, I heard. Just like her.”

Galena rubs his shoulder. “Don’t worry. She’ll cool off.”

Lena’s right, as always, even if she doesn’t know exactly what she’s right about. Ten minutes later, once Nora’s clocked out and joined them at the table, the first thing she does is ask her roommate, “Out of curiosity, what’s the usual treatment for cancer?”

“Oof.” Claire leans back in her seat, steepling her fingers in eagerness. “Well, not too long ago, your only options would’ve been meatball surgery and radiation, but we’ve made incredible advances in megavoltage and chemotherapy treatments. It really depends what kind of cancer you’ve got.”

“Any of those involve a shot every other day?” Nate asks hesitantly.

“No, good god,” the ghoul laughs. “That’d kill you off before the cancer even got its boots on! These are weekly treatments at most. See, first –”

He manages to catch Nora’s eye five minutes into Claire’s recitation of hospital horrors, gives her a relieved nod. She smiles in return so quickly he barely catches it before it’s gone and she’s turned back to Ari’s scribbled pages.


	3. Chapter 3

Neither of them bother to show up for the next engineering cram session. Ari breezes in the front door just under the wire again, crossing paths with Nate on his way back from walking Galena to the women’s dorm. 

“We missed you,” Nate says, counting the cigarettes in his pack. It’s the only one left from the carton, and he’s got to make it last until they’re safely past midterms and can take a night out off campus again. 

“I’m sure you and Galena just loathed having an evening all to yourselves,” Ari snickers. 

“Ted was here, too,” Nate replies, turning to the window so Ari won’t see him blush. Ted left early, but Ari doesn’t need to know that, or why the stripes of his usually immaculate sheets are a touch askew, as if someone’d noticed the time just two minutes from curfew. 

“What a shame.” Ari unbuttons his shirt, smells under his arm, shrugs, and buttons on his pyjama top. 

“The shame’s gonna be your grades in December,” Nate grumbles. 

“It’ll be fine. Nora and I did get _some_ studying in.” He lays back on his crumpled sheets, smiling softly toward the celling. “The shame’s really that we’re not taking anatomy. We’d ace it. Hell, we could teach the professor.” 

“Ha. Ha. Nobody warned me I’d be rooming with Henny Youngman.” 

“Buck buck buck!” 

“He wasn’t a rooster, he was a…” Nate rolls his eyes. “Never mind. Goodnight, sex maniac.” 

“Goodnight, Virgin Maury.” 

“I’m not a –” Nate lays down and takes a deep breath, his nose buried in a pillow that smells like White Shoulders. “I’m a nice girl, you cock – don’t get fresh with me.” 

* * * 

Nora rushes out of class the next day with her eyes down, pushing past Nate and Ted in the hallway. 

“Uh-oh…” 

Ari follows her out the door, hesitates, then joins the gang, instead. “How’d you all do?” 

Nate and Ted share a glance and shrug. Ari nods glumly. 

“Yeah, me too. I’m gonna hit the gym – want to join me?” 

“Yes!” Ted agrees, whipping off his glasses like he’s Drake Tungsten, ready to duck into the broom closet and leap out seconds later in his time-travelling space leotard. 

“I’ll take a rain check,” Nate says and, chasing a hunch, joins the influx of beret’d hipsters from the humanities wing to the student union. 

She’s there, in a corner booth, hunched over a tiny espresso and three notebooks. He watches for signs of life while he waits in line for his own drink and, seeing none, slides into the booth opposite her. 

“Mind if I join you?” 

“Yes,” she grumbles, and gulps her drink back in one go. “Ow. That was really hot.” 

He pops the cap off his Nuka Cola and pushes it over to her. “Feel free.” 

“Wow,” she says, “Big spender.” 

But that doesn’t stop her from sipping, rolling the cool soda around her scorched tongue. 

Over the PA, the music abruptly shifts from the James Last Orchestra to a song he knows – and knows very well they shouldn’t be playing. It’s not “A Change is Gonna Come” but it’s by that same very-late-and-unlamented pinko minstrel and thus hard as hell to find, let alone play out in the open…even in Massachusetts Bay’s own little commie corner. He cranes his neck to check out the counter staff again, but none of them look as nervous as they should. Only one even nods along, barely paying attention as she tamps down coffee grounds for a line of espressos. 

“You know who this is?” he whispers. 

She glances at the speaker over their heads. “It’s pretty.” 

It is pretty, just a voice smooth as warm milk crooning the usual love-n-marriage clichés, but somehow it also makes him feel like he’s 17 again, smoking on the little dock behind their house, so sure he’ll get his MBU acceptance letter and step into the future that’s been waiting for him since birth and just as sure they’ll reject him, and then what’ll he do? 

Her foot taps along under the table, her big ugly shoes brushing his. _I know I know I know when I’m near you_ , Sam Cooke sings above, never quite finishing a phrase. Like he just can’t stamp the feeling down into clunky words before it’s flowed past, out of reach. 

“That midterm was a monster, huh?” When she doesn’t reply, he pushes on with: “And Mercer’s a real Dr Frankenstein, telling us to focus on theory, and then the exam’s nothing but practical scenarios!” 

“That’s No Mercy for you,” she replies quietly. “It’s kind of right there in the name.” 

“You’ll get ‘em next time,” he tries. 

“I’m sure I’ll pass,” she sighs. “That’s not the problem. And it’s not even the first test I’ve taken hung over.” 

“Oh?” he asks, at a loss for any proper response. 

“But I skimped on my Western Civ prep, which I need an A in, just to maybe, _maybe_ , squeak into a B for Engineering. Not to mention all the time I lost shoring up Ari’s confidence, when he has the material down better than I do.” She shakes her head. “Pop was right. If I’m going to be a lawyer, I have to focus. I’m dropping the Engineering double major. Starting in January, History’s my only love.” 

“But –” he starts, chokes back _I’ll never see you_ , and continues, “You’re one of No Mercy’s pet students. And he doesn’t have pet students! He hates us all, just…just so much.” 

That earns him a tiny smile. 

“Why not drop History and give your heart to Engineering?” he persists. 

“Because History has a pre-law track, a very good one, that I’m dying to dive into,” she says with finality, pushing her hair back from her face, then twirling it into a fluffy bun at the base of her neck. “I’m already halfway through _The Federalist_ , for god’s sake – for fun!” 

“I’ll never see you.” 

Dammit. He stops biting his tongue for a second… 

“We’ll just have to double-date more often.” 

“Yes,” he raps a knuckle on the table. “Great idea – Lena and I are going stir-crazy on campus, and midterms will be done this week…” 

A tiny spark of life lights in the depths of her dark eyes. “I’m getting paid on Friday. We could all – maybe the Tip Tap?” 

He picks up his Nuka, not bothering to wipe the rim before he drinks. “Forget that – let’s go someplace with… _real tablecloths_!” 

“Oh, you kid!” She smiles, though, a real one, and takes another sip of his soda. “We can’t afford tablecloths.” 

“Hey, hey, the first one’s free, dollface, but any more…” 

She rolls her eyes at his broad wink and leans over to pick her purse off the floor, banging her elbow on the corner of the table. “Oh, ffffffffffu…cking hell. Damn!” 

“Want me to kiss your booboo and make it all better?” he chuckles, then looks over his shoulder, suddenly sure Galena’s decided to join them, even though she hates coffee and insists the whole student union smells like skunks are nesting in the deep fat fryer. 

“Ow,” she whimpers, rubbing her arm from elbow to shoulder. “And no, I already have a fella for that, thank you very much.” 

“So I hear – and then some!” 

She slowly lets her arm go and, not dropping her eyes from his, sits back in the booth. She crosses her legs behind the table, up high so her knees peek an inch or so out of her skirt, and rests her arms along the top of the booth like a high school swain trying to sneakily cop a feel off two imaginary sweethearts. 

And she waits. 

And waits. 

He blinks first. 

“It’s none of my business.” When she doesn’t respond, doesn’t so much as twitch an eyelid, he grinds out, “I’m sorry.” 

“I doubt that,” she growls, but softly, and uncrosses her legs to lean over again, pulling her study notes into a messy pile. Her fingernails – which when Ari’d introduced her had been painted a garish dark pink – are bare and filed flush to the quick. She’s been biting them like a little kid, he realises, tidying up the ragged edges afterward like a crime scene. It should be disgusting, but he finds the idea of her thoughtlessly chewing away as she studies, brow furrowed like someone’s going to plant corn up there, a little endearing. It’s a crack in her armor probably only he’s noticed.

Well, him and Ari. Of course Ari’s noticed. Keeping such a close watch on her anatomy, and all. They’re like peas in a pod, no matter what she says. 

“Why don’t you want to get married?” 

“Because you’re a jerk.” 

He snorts at the lightening-fast jab and fiddles with the bent bottlecap on the table, rocking it back and forth until the edges wear a tiny groove in the formica. “All right, I left myself open there. But, really – why not?” 

She slides it out from under his fingertips before he can do any more damage. “Why do you care?” 

“I don’t.” 

“Good.” 

He catches her wrist as she slides out of the booth. “It’s Ari. I’m worried about him.” 

She winces. 

_Bullseye_ , he thinks, with a bitter sort of triumph. 

She sits back down, rubbing her eyes. “Ari knows.” 

“Oh?” 

She takes another sip from his cola, and this time he lets her. “He says he doesn’t care, either.” 

“Oh.” 

“So we’re good?” 

“We were never…bad.” He waves his hand in a little circle over the bottle, like he’s trying to bibbidy-boppidy-boo it into the pint of Gwinnie he suddenly, desperately, needs. “I’m just…curious, is all. You’re a great girl, and, well…who doesn’t want to get married? I mean, someday?” 

“Me.” 

“You’ll change your mind.” 

“I won’t.” 

“You will. And it’ll be too late then. Ari n’me and every other decent guy’s gonna be at the front, with nice girls waiting at home for them.” 

“And I look forward to dancing at all of your weddings.” 

“No, you don’t.” 

“Okay, you got me,” she sighs, and he leans forward, already triumphant. “I _actually_ look forward to raiding all those open bars, and networking with your well-heeled relatives.” 

He smacks the table, and she laughs. “ _And_ the dancing. I really do like dancing.” 

He drags his fingers through his buzz-cut, half wishing it was long enough to tear out. “You’re just going to…to defend low-life criminals? Or prosecute them?” 

“I haven’t decided which, yet.” She crosses her legs again, but primly this time. The junior librarian’s back, glaring over invisible half-rim glasses. 

“All day and all night? With no one waiting at home but, what, a cat? Sixteen cats?” 

She smiles a little, looking down at her lap. “I’m more of a dog person.” 

“Don’t you want kids?” 

She shrugs, and he taps the bottlecap so hard it pings off the table. Neither of them bend over to pick it up. 

“Do you want kids?” she asks, the hard look fading like she’s actually curious. 

“A dozen of ‘em. My own baseball team, boys and girls.” 

“You’d be a…” She hesitates, then grins. “A really weird dad.” 

“You’d be a great mom,” he insists, unwilling to be derailed. “Look at how well you take care of Ari.” 

“Oh, god,” she groans, but laughing underneath it. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?” 

“Nope!” He grins back, bathing in the warmth of his victory. 

“Well, it’s already nearly the worst day of my life…” She sighs again, setting loose a strange cold feeling in his belly, but continues before he can call it off. “I thought I would get married. Had the fellow all picked out. Or, more accurately, he’d picked me out. Plucked off the branch the very second the law said I was ripe, and I felt like the luckiest girl in Springfield.” 

“Oh. Oh? So Ari’s not the…” 

She lets him trail off. “You don’t want to finish that sentence? Coward.” 

She’s right. He’s checking his watch, flipping through excuses – Ari and Ted are waiting for him at the gym, he’s got to meet Lena for some last-minute chemistry cramming, his thinks he hears his mother calling and has to wash his hands before supper – but that shuts his mouth. 

“Galena prefers gentlemen,” he shoots back limply, bracing himself for whatever horror she’s about to throw at him. Abortion? Syphilis? Syphilis abortion in the back of a gangland getaway car? 

“Yes, she does.” Nora neatens her stack of notes. “ _He_ was not a gentleman. He said he was 25.” 

She leans close, voice dropping to a sardonic whisper. “He lied.” 

He sits back, pushing at the edge of the table, and she mirrors him. 

“He said he was single.” Back to that hard whisper again. “He lied.” 

She rolls the papers into a tight scroll and jams them in her purse. “And, after a few exhilarating and, remembering them now, utterly humiliating months…he moved on to the next dumb bobbysoxer in the crowd to catch his eye.” 

She slides out of the booth, rubbing her elbow again. 

“That’s it?” 

She chuckles mirthlessly. “That’s it.” 

“ _That_ made you give up on men?” 

“I haven’t entirely given up on men. Obviously.” She rests her hip against the table for a moment, chewing her lip. “My grades slipped. Not far, but, well…I was going to be Missus Eddie Kray, just as soon as I turned 18. Wasn’t it more important to be at his beck and call? And, looking back, it’s disconcerting how... eager...I was to twist up and fit the little space a fellow declared was mine.” 

He shifts in the booth, waiting for her to continue. After a moment, she rolls her eyes and walks away, slipping into the line of junior historians grimly hurrying toward execution. He leaves the booth to the gaggle of hipsters pointedly standing two feet away, shifting scorching little mugs from hand to hand, and follows, watching her curly head bob ahead of the rest. 

He turns off before she reaches her classroom, taking the long way around the quad on his way back to the dorm, still chewing on her last words.  _Twisting up to fit a fellow’s space?_  

_Well?_

_Where’s the problem with that?_

Back in the dorm, he finds his handwritten midterm essay underneath an empty potato chip can, pulls his heavy typewriter out of its case up onto the desk, and throws himself into typing up the final draft. But it’s basically the same _Scarlet Letter_ paper he wrote for junior English two years ago, just padded out with three pages pretending every character relates somehow to an Emersonian self-reliance theme, so he can’t keep his mind on the words. He keeps hearing that easy, meaningless little melody instead _, You-you-you-you send me, honest you do, honest you do_ , and by the time Ari crashes in, he’s dragged the old hi-fi and taped-up box of 45s out from under his bed. 

“No.” 

“But –” 

“No!” Ari pushes the box back under the bed with his foot. 

“I’ll keep the volume down,” Nate wheedles. 

“You’re lucky I even let you keep that treasonous little collection in our room.” Ari finds a flask folded in his spare quilt and jabs it in Nate’s direction. “But if you get caught playing them, and I’m in here, I can’t exactly pretend I don’t know you have them, can I?” 

“It’s not treason to listen to a little music,” Nate grumbles, but accedes. He’s not entirely sure what the R.A.’s reaction would be, given it’s not exactly illegal to own music on obsolete formats, but… “And they’re all legally bought.” 

Albeit in cash, no receipts, from tent stalls and car trunks on the many, many, _many_ antiquing weekends his parents dragged him on over the years. Listening to old records gave him something to do when his father got his nose trapped in dusty old books and, hell, some of them were miles better than the crap on the radio. Was it his fault so many turned out to be performed by perverts and commie agitators, almost all of them dead at least a century? 

“Don’t even think about it. Don’t even hum.” Ari sits at Nate’s desk and jams a fresh piece of paper in the typewriter. “You mind, if you’re not using it?” 

“Be my guest.” 

He checks his watch, stomach sinking when he sees the time. Ted’s always late, but Galena and Nora should’ve arrived fifteen minutes ago, and they were supposed to bring Claire. That grim spectre certainly wouldn’t’ve let them blow off a study session. 

“Did…did Nora say they’d be late?” 

“Haven’t seen her since Mercer’s torture chamber.” 

“Oh.” 

He checks his pack again like the two cigarettes left might’ve started a family, then decides to make one a widow. He cracks the window, but before he can light it, he realises what’s got to’ve happened – they’re fighting! 

Nora left pissed off, had a bad time on her midterm, ran into Galena, and gave her the business over her boyfriend pestering her when she needed to study. And Galena got pissed in return that Nora’d talk so freely about…about sleeping around, with _her_ boyfriend. Sure, everyone knows Nora’s a low-class girl, first-rate brain or not, but heck, that’s practically an invitation to hop into her bed next, right? What was she thinking? 

“I’m going to check on them.” 

Ari grunts in response, pecking at the keys with his index fingers, then looks back. “Don’t tell Nora she’s gonna type this for me. She’d never come over.” 

Nate barely hears, tucking the cigarette behind his ear for later as he flies down three flights of stairs. Across the green at the girls’ dorm, he shows his ID, signs in, re-signs so his signature’s clearer, and endures a full thirty-second hairy eyeball from the house mother before she lets him in the hallway door, like he needed to be reminded why they held the study sessions in his room instead of here. 

“Shit!” someone whispers loudly as the door slams behind him, and, “Ixnay!” 

A dark head peeks around the corner, disappearing with a giggle. “It’s ok – s’only Nate!” 

“What in the hell…?” Nate starts, trailing off as Galena tucks under his arm, nipping the cigarette from behind his ear. 

“Stand watch with me.” She finds the lighter in his hip pocket, maybe lingering in there a little longer than she needs, and hands it to him to light the cigarette for her. “Thanks, I’m out of mentats.” 

“Any time,” he replies absently, craning his neck to peek around the corner. “What’s going on out here?” 

Whatever it is involves what’s got to be the entire hall crowded around Claire and Nora’s door like they’re all peeking in the keyhole at once. 

“Well, we got to talking about breaking and entering – as one does! – and Nora learned, to her great shock, that Claire hadn’t the faintest idea how to pick a lock.” She blows smoke from one side of her mouth, away from Nate, perfect ruby lips pursing up for an invisible sideways kiss. “Of course, there was nothing for it but to teach her right away. And, well, it’s turned into a bit of a life skills seminar, if not one the house mother would whole-heartedly approve of.” 

“And…you do?” 

Her eyes dance. “Who do you think was first in line?” 

A hastily hushed cheer goes up as the door clicks open, and Nora’s head bobs above the crowd. “Who’s next?” 

_Me_ , Nate almost volunteers, but someone’s got to keep up standards. So instead, when she sees him there on the outskirts of her acolytes, he only whispers, “How was Western Civ?” 

“A doddle!” She throws him a thumbs-up with the hand not mangling another bobby pin into a pick.  

_Good_ , he’d say, if she was even waiting for a response instead of holding another giggling girl’s hand, guiding the delicate little prods at her doorknob. _Good. So you’ll be right there next to me, and Ari, in Engineering 102 next semester…_  

* * * 

Except she won’t be. The next day, when they’re all crammed around the single copy of the spring semester course catalogue Ted managed to snag – at great personal risk to life and limb, as he reminds them when Ari complains at him circling his choices in pen – Nora picks out Rocks-for-Jocks, Macroeconomics, and three history classes. 

“What about Engineering?” 

“I’m sure it’ll go on without me…somehow,” she replies, passing the catalogue on to Galena. 

“Of course you’re taking the 8am Macro class,” Lena sighs. 

“You’d prefer Friday at 4?”

“Good point.” Lena notes down the earlier class’s code and flips back to the Sciences section. “Oh, fishsticks, Organic Chem’s lab is at 8, too! I’ll have to go to bed with the farmers all semester.” 

“I don’t advise it,” Ted teases. “They’ve got stamina, sure, but their wellies leave your sheets all muddy.” 

Galena smacks his shoulder, hiding a smile behind the catalogue. 

“You can’t even give it one more semester?” Nate asks Nora, then points to Ari. “This jamoke’ll flunk without you propping him up.” 

“You think so?” Ari asks, a spark of real fear in his eyes. 

“Shut up, Ari, you’re wrecking the curve for the rest of us and you damn well know it.” Nora shoots Nate a warning look and continues primly, “There’s no point. I’ve already dropped the double-major.” 

Nate checks his watch. “Since yesterday afternoon? When have you had time?” 

“Some people can make a decision.” Nora raises an eyebrow at him that no one else sees, turning away from the others to make a fuss pulling her books together. “Instead of waffling all semester when they know damn well what they want out of life.” 

Nate chews the inside of his lip, hoping his face hasn’t gone as red as it feels. 

She squeals when Ari catches her wrist and yanks her down onto his lap, giggling into his cheek as he whispers, “And no one can say my Nora doesn’t get what she wants.” 

“And that’s why she’s Mrs Eddie Kray right now,” Nate growls, picking up his own books, and doesn’t notice the ringing silence until no one follows him toward their English class. 

“Mrs Eddie…who?” Ari asks, standing up so fast Nora almost falls off his lap. 

She lands like a giant, ungainly cat, smoothing down her skirt. “Nobody.” 

“He doesn’t sound like nobody.” 

“He sounds like a gangster!” Ted pipes up. “Is he a gangster? Is he one of your dad’s gangster friends?” 

“What? No! Dad doesn’t have any –” She rubs the bridge of her nose, glaring at Nate through her fingers. Galena takes his elbow and tugs subtly, trying to get him out of blast range without setting off the mine he’s so foolishly armed. 

“So who is he?” Ari demands. “You got a guy at home? Is that why you go back to Springfield on weekends?” 

“No! He’s – he’s a singer,” she hisses at Ted, then puts on an ingratiating smile for Ari. “He’s just a bore I dated for a little while in high school.” 

“Who you were gonna marry?” Ari persists, face like a radioactive tomato. 

“I was a dumb teenager,” Nora replies, her face going still and cold. “And the topic is closed.” 

She stalks ahead, not waiting for the rest of the group. 

“Well!” Galena starts, but Nate runs after Nora, grabbing her arm. 

“Look, kid, calm down.” 

She yanks herself forward with surprising strength, almost pulling free. “Shut up, Nate.” 

“It was just a joke!” 

“Fuck you and your jokes,” she mutters and the obscenity, her ease with it, stops him cold. 

She takes advantage of his shock to get her fingers around some hitherto unknown weak spot in his elbow and pinches, hard, so he goes numb halfway up his arm and can’t keep hold of her. 

“Ow!” he whispers, trying to rub some feeling back into his hand, and lets her go on ahead. His numb fingers still feel her bicep, not soft and giving like he’d expected, but solid as if she’d been running ROTC drills all semester with him.  

Galena brushes past him, turning to whisper, “And how do you even know about this, if Ari doesn’t?” 

“I was trying to help –” Ari bumps his shoulder, a little too hard to be an accident, but not hard enough he can insist it’s on purpose. “You. I was trying to see if she was serious, or just messing you around.” 

“Why’s that any of your business?” 

“It was still a jerk move,” Galena adds, hurrying after her friend. 

_Ah, hell_ , he thinks. _That’s how she looked when I shoved Lonny into the kiddie end of the pool and he almost broke his neck._  

“Jeez,” he grouses at Ari anyway. “Try to help a buddy and see where it gets ya.” 

“Who asked you to?” 

Ted watches them, almost dancing on his heels in anticipation of a fight, letting off an audible sigh when Ari only walks away and follows him into the classroom. Nate lingers a minute, pretending to read the label on a fire extinguisher, until it feels a little less like he’s got his dongle hanging out for everyone to point and laugh at. 

Inside, Nora’s socked herself in a back corner desk, with Galena and Ted to her side and front like some kind of honor guard, with Ari in front of Ted as if he’s above the whole spat. Nate does him one better, taking the seat in front of him even though that puts him right under Miss Spencer’s witchy nose, so he doesn’t have to look at or think about any of them. 

That’s a resolution that lasts exactly three minutes after handing in his midterm paper and getting called on twice about the _Tell-Tale Heart_ , when he hasn’t even cracked his collected Poe. He tears a sheet out of his notebook and scribbles: _Don’t blame me. You didn’t say it was a secret._  

He folds it tight, scrawls _Nora_ on the outside, and, when the professor turns to the blackboard, hands it back to Ari. 

Who immediately unfolds it, as Nate should’ve expected. He peeks back and sees Ari frown but pass it on to Ted, who also reads it, chuckles, and passes it on to Nora, who hands it to Galena without even looking at it. 

Nate turns his back on the whole mess again, knowing for sure this time he’s flushed like a stoplight when Miss Spencer hesitates before calling on him again, then mercifully moves on to another victim. Still, he’s not surprised at the sharp poke in his back, cupping his hand below desk level to catch the note Ari drops. 

_I thought we were pals, but it’s clear now you’re just a petty, spoiled child grubbing for attention – from Anyone!_ 

She’s got nice handwriting, he can’t help but notice. It makes his line above hers look like a kindergartener scribbled it – probably on purpose. He writes his next sentence carefully: 

_Why’s there anything you’d tell a “pal” your boyfriend wouldn’t already know?_  

Behind him, there’s a grunt of agreement, a whispered “Oh hell yes!”, a sharply indrawn breath, and the snap of a pencil point – followed by the loud, pointed crumpling of paper. He peeks back in time to catch Galena tuck the paper ball in her purse and glare all four of them into at least feigned attention through the rest of class. 

In the hall outside afterward, hands on her hips, she jerks her chin between Nate and Nora. “You two: you’re both wrong. Shake hands and make up.” 

Nora’s white around the lips but sticks her hand out like a shiv. She’s glaring at his ear, but to everyone else it probably looks like she’s locked eyes with him so bravely, what else can he do but take her hand, grip it tight like it’s a freshly caught trout that swallowed the lure? 

“Good.” Galena looks away as they both yank their hands back, turning her spotlight on Ari. “And now you two go work things out. I will not have my first night out in weeks ruined by you three children – are we clear?” 

Nora melts under the heat, scuffing her toe on the linoleum before offering, “Buy you a coffee?” 

Ari only grunts again but follows her toward the student union. Galena nods in satisfaction, then shakes her head before Nate can open his mouth, snagging Claire’s elbow as she’s the last to leave the classroom. 

“We have to get a head start on our Poe essays before date night,” she tells him firmly, hauling Claire away. 

“We do?” Claire asks, blinking as she comes down out of her reverie, probably picturing all the dog and cat guts she’ll get to poke around in that weekend at the clinic. “Okay. Sure. But you’re still doing my hair, right?” 

Ted grins after them, almost doing a little jig in the hallway. “Oh man, I almost wish I was going with you four. To be a fly on that wall…” 

“Shut up, Ted.” 

He only laughs and pokes at Nate’s waist, trying to pinch a non-existent spare tire. “Gym?” 

Nate glances up and down the now-empty hallway for literally any other option before sighing agreement. It’ll be Ted’s fault, he tells himself, that the speedbag under his fists is gonna look like her face and somewhere, somehow, the Professor will just know his son’s failed yet again to be a Freis-quality gentleman.


	4. Chapter 4

He’s yawning and cursing himself later, for challenging Ted on the speedbag…AND a push-ups contest…and then a footrace around the quad, hoping to win two out of three. His arms are like noodles, protesting the little effort of putting on his best clothes: pressed tan slacks and an olive sportcoat he last wore to graduation.

He fumbles putting on the lime-green tie and loses the knot he’d left in it. Ari chuckles, watching him dither at their mirror: _over, up, down, over, up…down again? That can’t be right._

“You need a hand?”

“No, I do not.” _Over…around the back…up…then…_ “It’s just been a while since I did this.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Shut up, Ari.”

Ari smiles, but it’s half-hearted and he goes quiet again quick. He’s been like that since he got back to their room, just put on his (un-pressed, Nate notices) good suit and flopped out with his engineering textbooks. Not studying, just doodling bridges, artistic suspension swoops pestered by arrows and numbers like July mosquitoes. Nate wants to ask how it went, if he and Nora are back on track again, but hell. He’s only just got the taste of his own toenails out of his mouth.

“Hey losers.” Ted pokes his head in their open door. “You both decent? No? Good. Gimme a hand with this.”

He holds out his own tie, a flashy red number that will clash like a clown nose against his blue checked sportcoat.

“Pass,” says Ari.

“Same,” Nate adds and admits, “I can’t even wrestle this noose into shape. My Mom tied it when I was 14 and this is the first time it’s come loose.”

Ted loops it around his neck. “Maybe Claire can do it for me. Girls always know how – why is that, when they never wear them?”

“Women are a complete mystery,” Ari says, but mildly, tracing his bridge span with one thick finger.

“You’re taking out _Claire_?” At Ted’s frown, Nate recovers with: “What happened to Betty?”

“Midge happened to Betty.” Ted bumps Nate to one side to take over the mirror, giving his long beatnik hair another pass with the comb. Nate rolls his eyes – it hangs clear over his collar, for God’s sake! How can he stand it? “And Claire happened to Midge. Keep up, will ya?”

“I can’t keep track of your social life, not since my slide rule snapped under the pressure,” Ari says, erasing a riverbank.

Nate turns a little, definitely not comparing the broad span of his shoulders to Ted’s, or noticing the other guy’s just a hair taller even when he stands at attention, pretending to check the lay of his jacket. Not that it matters, when Ted’s got a face more like a milk cow than a matinee idol. As for Nate, a young version of his famous grandfather looks back at him, except with more hair. He’s got nothing to worry about.

Galena’s voice drifts in from the hall. “Men always take so long to get ready.”

“Wait,” Nate calls out. “I haven’t got all the handkerchiefs and pigeons stuffed up my sleeves, yet!”

She laughs and pushes the door open, stepping carefully around the pile of books Ari’s left as a doorstop. She’s a vision – of course – all bright lips and long lashes and perfectly curled hair and tiny waist and pert nose and marshmallow fluff of a skirt that shows off every bit of her knees and maybe just a tiny hint of thigh, good God, she’s definitely trying to kill him. He holds back a wolf whistle with the restraint of a saint.

Ted, lacking even the restraint of an altar boy, lets loose, but she just laughs and lifts her arms, tilts her hips, posing like a Fallon’s mannequin. “Mother helped me pick it out in Saks just before school started. I’ve been _dying_ to give it a test run. And Nora let Claire and me borrow her good eyeshadow and –”

Galena looks at the empty space next to her, then at Ari, and frowns, while Nate tries to figure out what she just said, since it certainly wasn’t that _Nora_ had _makeup_ worth borrowing…

“Nora,” she calls out, with a ring of command that’d make the General proud.

Her friend enters, back ramrod straight like she _wasn’t_ hiding in the hall, _certainly not_. “It’s crowded in here already, is all.”

She hangs in the doorway, slouching faux-casually against the frame with her ankles crossed, as if she’s in her plumbing dungarees and not a lovely frock of her own. Not new, obviously, but it hugs her figure like she’s got one and even if a little faded, the rose satin brings a glow to her dark complexion that’s not all from – yes, he’d heard right – expertly applied makeup. Unlike Lena, hers highlights all her angles instead of softening them, turning her face into sharp planes Nate could record in a blueprint, calculating the change in wind load if she smiled.

“Hey honey,” Ari calls softly, and she doesn’t clomp in her high pumps as she crosses the room, presses her lips to his in a delicate peck that leaves her lipstick intact.

“Claire’s waiting downstairs,” Galena tells Ted, then stage-whispers to Nate, “She’s so _nervous_! She threw up twice getting ready and almost fainted at the elevator. Your R.A.’s got the smelling salts under her nose as we speak.”

“She’s exaggerating.” Nora rolls her eyes – at Ari – and gives Ted an encouraging little smile, but Nate may as well not be in the room. A look passes between her and Galena, and Nate’s struck again at the difference, even under identical facepaint. Galena really does belong in a Fallon’s catalogue, modelling pretty schoolgirl clothes, but Nora…she could be a fifty-foot lady on a drive-in movie screen.

Not the lead ingenue, or a femme fatale. A spinster aunt, maybe.

“Boy oh boy.” Ted gestures to his neck like he’s clawing for breath in a gas attack. “Hogtie me so I look pretty for ‘er, sweetcheeks.”

Galena takes the tie and flips up his collar, stepping so close she’s got to be getting a next-to-fatal blast of his usual dragon breath.

He tries to rescue her, tugging at his own unravelling knot. “I need a hand, too.”

She doesn’t take the lifeline. Instead, she orders again with a single word: “Nora?”

Nora goes all white around the lips again but immediately smooths it out, touching the corner of her eye like the sour face might’ve made her mascara run. When she tucks his lapels out of the way, the high sweep of her hair brushing his nose, her expression’s not like she’s touching the most loathsome man in the universe. More like plotting out a tricky tangent, in pen so she’s only got one shot.

Encouraged, he tells her quietly, “You look almost presentable.”

The corners of her mouth quirk up, but her eyes don’t leave the knot forming under her fingers. The enthusiastic upward flip of his tie that whaps his chin is probably just an accident. Moments later, she’s adjusting the length of both ends, giving the knot a satisfied pat, and re-settling his lapels; it feels like he’s passed a harder inspection than his ROTC supervisor ever set.

“Your eyes are green.” It’s not a compliment, just a statement of fact. “They look blue, until you wear something that brings them out, like your uniform.”

“Is that an improvement?”

“I prefer blue.” But she’s smirking again, just a little, under her demurely cast-down gaze.

“Done,” Galena declares, smacking at Ted’s hands as he immediately yanks at the tie to loosen it. “Why don’t you two come with us?”

“I do my best work without an audience.” Ted grins wolfishly. “Besides, I made reservations for two.”

_Right_ , Nate thinks. _Reservations. The kind of thing you need at a place with real tablecloths._

But that’s the kind of thing his parents do, not him.

_Not yet_.

The thought puts a chill in his stomach, in a way he can’t pin down. Someday, it won’t be good enough to crash into the Tip Tap, hoping there’ll still be even a stool free to put their drinks on, not if he wants a pretty lady to stay on his arm.

“Go easy on her. She’s…a bit new to,” Nora gestures vaguely at her dress and shoes. “All of this.”

Nate doesn’t need Galena’s sharp look to keep his mouth shut, this time.

“I’m an excellent shepherd,” Ted insists, stone-faced, before letting loose another wolf whistle and bounding down the hallway.

Galena and Nora follow while Nate locks up, drifting below a flickering overhead light like two bits of strangely colourful dandelion fluff, sleek dark heads together as they whisper. If he didn’t know better, and maybe in very, very dim light, he could think they were sisters.

If he were a guy who preferred a little meat on the bone, he might even think Ari’s girl was the looker in the family.

Ari watches them, too, rattling his keys in his pocket.

Nate nudges him as he passes. “Who knew, huh?”

“I did.”

The October chill’s all the excuse the girls need to cuddle up close, shivering dramatically beneath shawls and giggling as they cross the damp grass of the quad. The noise and smell of city traffic hits them as soon as they pass the softball field like they’ve crossed a magic threshold out of fairyland. They hail a cab and cram in the back, him and Ari hidden like cake layers between fondant. His hand lands on a stocking-skinned knee that doesn’t pull away when he cups it, runs his little finger along the bulge of a strong calf.

“Real! World! Real! World!” Galena and Nora chant like they’re at a football game, cheering when the driver peels through the roundabout and over the train tracks that lead downtown.

Ari rolls his eyes at Nate but the excitement’s infectious and within minutes they’re all goggling like babies at the bright Boston lights, pointing out landmarks as they pass. Nate’s pretty sure the driver’s padding out the meter “considerately” making sure they don’t miss a single one, but with two pretty girls practically sharing his lap, can’t bring himself to complain. They tumble onto the street as a multi-limbed mass, Nate and Ari splitting the eye-popping fare and launching a supplies raid on a nearby liquor store as the girls skip ahead into the Tap.

They wave from a prime corner booth, four glasses of beer already fizzing on the table and cheer again when Ari and Nate lay their spoils on the table, keeping the bottles to restock Ari’s bedsheets well out of sight.

“That’s it, I’m tapped out,” Ari tells Nora, lighting two cigarettes as she scoops three packs of mentats into her purse. “It’s bread and water for us tonight.”

“Oh, poo,” Galena starts. “Surely you’ve got more pocket money than –”

“I’m covering our dinner,” Nora interrupts, snapping her purse shut and accepting a cigarette from Ari. “It’s payday!”

“How bohemian,” Lena laughs and orders a gin and tonic.

“One red and one white,” Nate tells the waitress, when she asks what wine they’d like with dinner. That’ll cover all the bases, he’s sure.

“They brought you two drinks?” Nora asks when Lena’s comes and she laughs again, shows her how to mix from the two small bottles and sprinkle in the twist of lime-flavored powder.

Nora doesn’t know _anything_ , but she’s so delighted at her first sip of gin that Nate can’t help but imagine everything else he could introduce a plumber’s daughter to. First martini. First baseball game that’s not on tv, in a seat practically on the diamond. First stroll along Rehoboth’s boardwalk…no, Ocean City’d be more her style. She’d drag him by the hand to the rinky-dink amusement park on the big pier, probably straight to the haunted house ride with the narrow seats that put a girl in your arms even before the shaking skeletons make her scream.

“Order your own!” Galena giggles, holding the glass out of Nora’s reach when she goes for another sip, then squeals when Ari takes advantage of her distraction to tip a good slurp of it into his own mouth. “You two savages deserve each other.”

The arrival of their burgers inspires a momentary armistice. Galena shakes her head when he goes to pour a round of white, so he pops open the red instead, shoving bottles and glasses around the table to make space.

“I wonder what they’re playing tonight,” Nora ponders, watching the band set up on the little stage in the opposite corner. There’s a smear of ketchup on her chin. “I don’t recognise the name on the drum.”

“Who cares?” Galena sighs dreamily. “So long as it’s got a beat we can dance to.”

“Is that a tuba?” Ari asks.

Nate reaches between wine bottles, rubs the ketchup away with his thumb. Nora blinks at the touch, but doesn’t protest.

“That’s definitely a tuba,” Lena confirms, a touch of doubt creeping into her voice.

Nora shrugs and takes an extra-big bite of her burger. Nate wonders if she’s blushing, under the rouge.

“Well,” Lena continues bravely. “Tuba or not, I still don’t care. Even if the band’s not as…young…as we might’ve preferred.”

“Cripes, does the drummer have a…yeah, that’s a zimmer frame.” Ari steals a handful of fries from her plate, having already inhaled his food faster than an Electrolux.

Nora pushes her plate closer to him, bottles clinking. “That’s the hi-hats, dummy.”

Empty beer glasses teeter dangerously close to falling off the table. Nate catches and piles them on his cleared plate, then tops up everyone’s wine glasses with the rest of the bottle. He adds that dead soldier to the pile at his elbow and leans with relief into the little breathing space he’s made between them. “You know a lot about drums?”

She sips her wine, shifting so her shoulder touches Ari’s. “A little.”

He can’t resist. “You got a lot of experience with…live music?”

Her eyelashes twitch like a rattlesnake’s tail, but she only shrugs again. “As much as any other urbane, cosmopolitan Springfield girl-about-town, I suppose.”

She sets what’s left of her burger on the plate and drains her wine glass, tilting it toward Ari for a refill from the second bottle. He claims the rest of her food as a tip for exemplary service.

While Ari’s mouth is full, Nate leans closer and asks, “Any chance you've got more...adventurous...tastes than that shit they play on GNN?”

“Language,” Galena murmurs.

Her neat little pump nudges his shoe under the table. He stretches his legs out until it’s Ari’s feet in his way, then settles to one side in the only place his won’t get kicked. Nora crosses her legs, one foot dangling beside the table, to make space.

“I like to dance,” she says, which isn’t an answer.

“So do I, but you could foxtrot to a heartbeat if you were dead set on it,” he persists. “I mean, do you like music that…that makes you feel something? Way down low, you know?”

“Don’t pester, Nate,” Galena warns, softly, then more loudly: “Who doesn’t love to dance, if they’ve got two feet and a heart?”

“Amen,” Ari agrees with a wry nod, draining his glass. “We’re running perilously low on fuel, ladies and Nate. Shall I rectify this before we’re coasting on fumes?”

“I don’t know,” Nate hesitates, still watching Nora. Her foot twitches, brushing his knee.

“I’ve got to powder my nose,” Galena announces abruptly, her hip bumping Nate’s until he moves out of the booth. “Nora?”

“Yes, dear,” Nora answers, lashes brushing her cheeks.

Nate catches her elbow when she goes to follow. “You do know, don’t you?”

She looks down at his hand like she might shake it off again, but then her eyes flick up to meet his and she whispers, “I fell for a singer, didn’t I? It certainly wasn’t his looks.”

“What’d she say?” Ari asks as he sits back down.

Nate peels the wrapping off a fresh pack and taps out two cigarettes, handing one to Ari. “To stop pestering.”

“That doesn’t sound like her.”

“Well, I can’t repeat her actual words without having to say ten Hail Mary’s on her behalf Sunday morning.”

Ari laughs, leaning back when the waitress clears their dishes, replacing them with a candle in a stained-glass cup. Nate picks it up to light his cigarette.

“Another round?” she asks.

“Yes!” Ari says, and asks Nate, “White or red this time? Or maybe four G-n-T’s?”

“Give us a minute,” Nate tells the waitress, casting his eye over the sad old men setting up on the stage. One of them warms up on his dinged trombone with a sour _wah-waaaah_.

“Maybe they book the good band for Saturday nights,” Ari observes. “We’ll try a Saturday, next double-date.”

“Sure,” Nate agrees, but he can almost feel the vinyl ridges vibrating along his fingerprints, hear the friendly hiss of the hifi needle… “Y’know, we’ve got a whole bag of booze here, enough to tank a whole battleship…”

“Y’know, if I spend another Friday night on campus, chances are good I’ll blow what’s left of my brains out,” Ari replies with aggressive cheer. “And I’ll do it on your side of the room.”

“Let’s put it to a vote,” Nate suggests, when the girls re-join them, with freshened warpaint and miasma of White Shoulders like mustard gas let off into a headwind.

“Put what to a vote?” Galena asks warily, patting the crinoline around her knees.

“That we lay tracks out of Loserville!” He ignores the round of glares from the table next to them, but lowers his voice a little. “We’ve got booze, and I’ve got some real music you’ve never even heard, and…”

“It’s date night,” Lena protests, like he’s proposed an orgy at Easter Mass, and shoots Nora a look.

“Yes, it’s date night,” Nora echoes, with only the tiniest lift of her eyes toward the ceiling. Her lips tighten as the trombone player starts up again: _Wah-wah._

_Wah-waaah._

_Wah-WAAAAAH._

“Oh, lord,” she mutters, sinking the rest of her wine in one gulp. Ari’s eyes follow the motion, narrowing when the empty glass thumps to their table.

“I don’t even feel like dancing,” Nate tries again. “And we’ve got ROTC bright and early tomorrow.”

“I feel like dancing,” Lena insists with finality.

“So do I!” Ari adds, and snaps his fingers for the waitress. She looks up at him from the bar, then goes to serve another table as far from theirs as possible.

The drummer drops a jazz rake, then knocks over his hi-hat when he bends to pick it up.

“I vote for booze and commie records,” Nora throws in, pulling her shawl around her shoulders.

“Nora…” Ari starts, cheeks like ruddy mushroom clouds, then shrugs sharply. “Fine. Do what you want. I wanna dance. I wanna breath air outside my dorm prison walls for just one night.”

“So do I!” Galena whines, then makes a shooing gesture. “So you two spoilsports run on home.”

“Yeah, who needs ya?” Ari adds.

Nora kisses his temple. “See you at home, dear.”

“Lena,” Nate starts, almost convinced he wants to convince her, but Nora’s halfway to the door. “We’ll all have so much more fun…”

Ari pushes the paper bag at him. “Haul this gear home, if you’re going.”

“Fine.” He puts on an affronted look and marches across the bar, double-timing it to catch up with Nora. He looks back before pushing open the door…and wishes he hadn’t.

But outside, Nora’s on the curb, the excited huffs of her breath hanging in the cold air as she waves down a bus that’s pulling away from the corner. “Hurry, Nate!”

He runs and takes her elbow and they leap together into the door just before it closes. She pays the conductor in bills from her purse, parrying the old man’s unamused glare with a coquettish smile he’s never seen on her face, could never have pictured roosting there like a lost, exotic bird. He follows her to a seat at the back, past shift workers, a woman with a baby asleep on her lap, and a high school kid who’s got to be lost, this time of night.

“We could’ve called a cab,” he protests, letting her have the window.

“I’m not paying for a cab,” she says, and then her hand flies to her mouth. “We ditched Galena with the bill!”

“Oh. Yeah. We kinda did.” And with all their drinks, even in a dive like the Tap, it wasn’t going to be cheap.

She laughs, despite her horrified expression. “She’s going to kill me.”

“She’s got her ‘emergency’ credit card,” Nate snorts. “She’ll be fine, assuming she left anything on the mannequins at Sak’s last month.”

Nora rubs at the smear of lipstick on her fingers, then takes a tissue from her purse and wipes the rest away, checking her reflection in the bus’s window. She catches Nate’s eyes in the glass, catches him watching her lips, and the tip of her tongue moves between them for just an instant.

“Lena’s mad at me.”

“What’s she got to be mad at _you_ for?” he asks the Nora in the window, like he’s got no idea at all.

“Because you pay me too much attention.” Mirror-Nora’s gaze is level. “And I don’t stop you.”

He doesn’t have a reply for her.

Streetlights move behind the glass. Music spills out of a bar as they pass, along with a patron who empties his guts into a newspaper dispenser, cursing the bus as it almost clips him pulling into the next stop.

“I do love the nightlife.” Her lips lift in a wry little half-smile, but it’s her own face she’s looking into, not the street outside.

The Nate in the reflection lifts his arm, rests it along the back of the seat. The Nora next to him holds her breath…then closes her eyes. The shoulder closest to him dips, becoming the nub of a puzzle piece to fit the gap by his side, so when the bus lurches off, his arm just…kinda…falls over her. It’s humid in the bus but he can see little pricks of frost developing in the condensation. It’s cold by the window, so she shivers.

“I wish you’d leave me alone,” her reflection says.

She doesn’t pull away when his arm tightens, his fingers finding the gaps in her shawl’s fringe.

He shifts the bag of booze in his lap.

The bus is nearly empty when it reaches campus, and without all those humid human bodies warming it up, he’s got to keep close to her, if she’s not going to freeze in that draft. She shivers despite his efforts, her hand chilly in his as they cross the softball diamond. At the men’s dorm, he lets go only to hold the paper bag close to his chest so it looks like groceries, so the bottles won’t clink when he signs in.

“You only have to wait a minute or two,” he orders. “Sign in to visit Ari, not me.”

“I know that.” She tightens the shawl around her shoulders and turns away, facing the girl’s dorm across the quad. He thinks about leaving the heavy bag with her, as an anchor…but he’s a gentleman.

There’s no one at the front desk when he signs his name. A poindexter, alone at the study nook in the lobby, tells him, “R.A.’s got a date. We’re on the honor system tonight.”

“Oh.”

There’s no sign of Nora outside. He’s a dozen steps into the darkness of the quad when her amused voice stops him cold.

“I’m right here, doofus.”

She’s beside the stairs, partly out of the wind, a few escaped curls battering her cheeks even so.

“I though you scarpered,” he admits.

“And you were going to run me down?”

He wants to hide his blush, kick the grass like a little kid, but then she’d win. “If you were in the mood to be caught.”

She looks away, tucking a curl behind her ear.

“The R.A.’s got a hot one tonight. We can walk in together.” He shifts the clinking bag to one side and offers his elbow. “If you want to.”

The poindexter doesn’t even look up from his books when they pass. She takes the stairs two at a time, a flight ahead of him even in heels, the shawl sliding to hang from her wrists. At his door, she reaches for the bag so he can find his keys, the muscles in her shoulders flexing as she hefts it on her hip like a toddler. Under the bright hallway lights, there’s a funny mottled look to the arm closest to him, dark blotches marring the warm olive skin.

She follows his glance and shrugs, sharply nonchalant.

“What’s that from?” he asks like he’s got no idea.

“Just some jerk, this morning,” she responds with a challenging look, then pushes past him into the room. “Mistook me for a stuck refrigerator door.”

“Oh.”

He’d just wanted to talk to her. If she hadn’t made it so hard…

“Where’s those records?”

He pulls an unlabelled jar from the bag and hands it to her before diving under his bed. “Try that.”

“What is it?” She opens up the jar and sniffs. “Woof!”

“Special brew,” he tells her. “Liquor store guy recommended it, said his cousin distils it back in the hills.”

“Well,” she sniffs again. “I…I’ve certainly never let certain blindness keep me from simple country pleasures.”

He laughs, flicking through his box, rejecting “My Big Ten-Inch” and “Bloodshot Eyes” before settling on “Hound Dog”, giving the record a little twirl on his finger before setting the needle.

“Big Mama Thornton,” he tells her, laughing again as she finally takes a sip and almost spits it back out with a strangled _blegh!_ “It grows on you.”

“It…hoo boy.” She thumps gracelessly down on his bed. “It doesn’t take its time, huh?”

“Dizzy?”

“A little.” She kicks her shoes off and tucks her stockinged feet under her skirt. “I don’t usually drink…wine.”

She puts a deep Transylvanian burr on the last two words, popping her eyes like he needs the joke underlined to get it. He pushes the trash can closer to his bed.

“Try a little more.”

She takes the jar again, tilting her head toward the hi-fi as Big Mama growls, “ _You ain’t nothin but a hound dog, snooping ‘round my door”_ , and he wishes for a second he’d kept looking until he found a better icebreaker.

“She’s angry,” she observes, taking a larger sip and pulling a face again. “I like her.”

Nate pours himself a little glass and waits for her nod before setting up a second. She doesn’t reach for it, though, instead leaning back on his pillow and closing her eyes.

“Dizzy?” he asks again, like a goddamned idiot.

“Hmmm.” She takes a deep breath, nodding along to the music. “I just need a minute. Put on another one, will you?”

Something gentle, he thinks, and offers, “Otis Redding?”

“Never heard of him.”

“You and everyone else.”

She smiles at the first line: “ _Oh she may be weary…young girls, they do get weary”_. “A little on the nose, dear?”

“Just listen.”

Her feet peek out from under her skirt and tap at thin air as Otis warms up. “That’s…different.”

“Good, different?”

“Definitely…different. You’d never hear this on GNN.”

“Never. There’d be a riot.”

She chuckles, rubbing her forehead. “A few angry letters, maybe. He’s rather…hmm…explicit in his suggestions for treating the…”

“The what?” he teases, hiding a grin behind the rim of his glass.

She sits up, carefully straightening his blanket, and crosses her legs primly. “The epidemic of weariness plaguing the young ladies of this great nation. Keeping them from their patriotic needlepoint, and whatnot.”

“Don’t fuss at that,” he says, as she tugs his blanket again, and sets the needle on a Chubby Checker record.

“But it’s so neat. You could bounce a bottlecap off the top sheet! I feel like I’m defiling the Platonic ideal of hospital corners.”

“It’s been plenty defiled, don’t you worry.” She raises an _oh-really_ kinda eyebrow. “Just make the bed again, and it’s good as new.”

“I suppose it’s different for boys…beds.”

He rolls his eyes back at her.

_Come on everybody_! Chubby demands. _Clap your hands_!

“Where did you even find these records?”

_Aw, you’re looking good!_

“I…you’ve got to know where to look,” he tells her, not wanting her to picture a skinny bored kid, tagging at his parents' heels. “And take risks people usually wouldn’t. I’ve, um, I’ve never been the type to settle for what’s easy, not when I could be…extraordinary.”

Her expression gives him nothing.

“You know what I mean?”

“Plenty of folk are happy to be ordinary.”

“Yeah, tell me that when you’re in the Oval Office.”

She grins at that. “No, I’m going to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. My senior-year vocation quiz said so.”

“You’re aiming too low.”

“I never knew you held me in such high esteem.”

“I, uh…c’mere, stand up!” He re-sets the needle. “My mother knew this dance, from when she was a kid. You’ll love it.”

He takes her hand, but she doesn’t move any closer. He plunges ahead anyway.

“Okay, see, your shoulders kind of go one way, and your hips go the other, and…”

She collapses on the carpet, howling with laughter. “That is _not_ a dance!”

“Come on! Just try it.” He finds the cover, shows her the photo of the couple of the front, grinning like it’s perfectly normal to crumple up into a corkscrew, so long as there’s two of you doing it. “See? It’s really a dance. Is a little leap of faith too much to ask?”

She takes his hand, then, and lets him pull her to her feet. “I swear, if this is a gag…”

_“We’re gonna do the twist and it goes like this…”_

She gets the hang of it instantly, of course. Just like everything else. “Is this right?”

He tries to match her rhythm. “Yeah.”

“It feels goofy as hell.”

_“Come on let’s twist again, like we did last summer…”_

“But fun?”

“Yeah.” She throws in a little shimmy that strains the low collar of her dress. “But what happened last summer? I feel like we’re missing something essential to…you know…really grasping the…the…”

“The lore,” he tries. “The epic history of…The Twist, dun dun dun!”

“We’ll never know.” Her eyes dance as nimbly as her hips.

“Tragically, no…wait!” He drops her hand and digs through the stack, then changes out Chubby for good ol’ Sam Cooke. “Enlightenment!”

_“Let me tell you about a place, somewhere up in New York way… Where the people are so gay, twistin' the night away.”_

“Oh, of _course_ it’s New York’s fault.” She dances a little closer. “This is the same singer, right? From the student union?”

“Yeah!” He blinks, surprised she remembered, but he shouldn’t be. “You don’t miss a thing, do you?”

She doesn’t answer, gaze dropping to the floor as she adds a little fancy, Madison-esque footwork to her moves.

“I’ve got more,” he says when the record finishes, and flips to the B-side, which has never been his favorite. Bit of a drone, really, narrating some boring party, backed up by a string arrangement on just the wrong side of shrill – but it’s a dance record, so right now it’ll do.

“Another twist?” she asks hopefully.

“I’m fresh out.”

“Awww, I was having fun!”

But she lifts her arms obediently enough as the needle hisses, following him in a bog-standard lindy, as much as they can manage on the little scrap of dorm room carpet not wasted on beds and desks. He has to hold her close; there’s no room for fancy swing-outs. Her hand tucks inside his like a warm little bird pressed to his chest.

_“The nuka’s in the icebox, popcorn's on the table. Me and my baby, we're out here on the floor.”_

He can see it, suddenly – some tiny, ridiculous New York apartment barely bigger than his room, but crammed with sophisticated people. Drinking rum and nuka, probably, talking about…Proust, maybe? Or politics, casually punching around borderline-socialist ideas like no one’s listening, or maybe her beloved _Federalist_ , whatever that is.

_“Everybody's swingin'…Sally's doin' the twist now…”_

“There it is,” she says, smiling at him and, without her heels, she has to crane her neck to do it. "You lied."

_“If you take requests I've got a few for you…”_

That’s the life waiting for her. Sharp people, like her, waiting to share it. No hand-me-down dreams, just whatever the hell they want to do, whatever the hell it takes to do it.

“Nate?”

He stopped moving a few bars back and she’s pulling away, but that won’t do. It won’t do at all.

“You ever think,” he starts, but runs out of gas there. He can’t imagine what she thinks, not really. Those eyes, dark as the little espressos she sneaks in between classes, they look right into him but don’t give anything away.

Except she’s up on her toes, crinoline crinkling as she presses tight against him, so maybe he’s not so far off, after all.

**_She_** _kissed **me**_ , he thinks firmly and wrecks her hard work, Spray Net surrendering to his fingers and releasing curls that smell faintly of coconut, somewhere under borrowed perfume and apple-y eau de moonshine. It’s familiar and foreign and he won’t think about that too hard, not with her arms tight around his ribs for balance, yielding backwards when he kisses her back, chasing the taste of her she’s all too happy to give over.

She breaks away when the back of her legs meet his mattress, and he’s a little dizzy himself but not so out of it he can’t catch her, pull her back to his chest. His lips still feel like hers are locked on target, demanding and sure; the back of his head tingles where she dragged her short nails through the bristles of his hair, all of them standing on end. He can’t reconcile that with the trembling girl in his arms, small enough to tuck his chin over her head.

Except she feels good that way, too. Maybe better.

He pulls just far enough away to grab her chin, tilt her head back up and, when she opens her mouth to say something neither of them want to hear, plants another one on her. She whimpers, grabbing fistfuls of his sportcoat. Her lashes brush the corner of his eye like frantic butterfly wings.

Somewhere very far away, the hi-fi needle hisses and pops, riding the empty center of the disk.

His fingers find nothing on the back of her dress, just smooth fabric bucking the waves of her shoulderblades. The zipper’s hidden under her arm and he’s only got it halfway down when her fists go flat against his chest.

“It’s okay,” he whispers, closing his eyes, and the zipper’s caught but he can surmount it. He’s not going to rip her dress – he’s not a complete savage, for god’s sake – but she wriggles in his arms and then…and then she’s not in his arms. She drops like someone’s chopped her off at the knees and those fists are back but pushing into his belly, way down low, but not punching…not yet.

He takes the warning and lets go. “What the hell?”

She staggers up out of a squat that’d make his ROTC supervisor proud, ricocheting off his bed and making a break for the door.

“Wait, Nora, look –”

It’s the stuck zipper that stops her, not his voice. She rests her forehead on the door and takes a deep breath.

“I can help,” he offers, but takes a step away at her sharp look.

“That’s enough.”

“Enough of what?”

She twists, arms in a strangely Grecian pose as she tugs fabric free of the zip and does herself back up. “Enough to drink, certainly.”

“Don’t be like that,” he groans, taking a long sip of his moonshine to spite her. “That’s just something girls say when…when…”

“When they’ve had too much to drink.” She pushes her hair back from her face, finds a rubber band on Ari’s desk to secure it in her everyday loose bun, and fans herself with a calc worksheet.

It is hot as hell in the little room, all of a sudden. He throws his crumpled sportcoat on the bed and cracks the window. “When they want to get some guy in dutch.”

“Lot of girls had cause to get you in dutch?” she asks through her teeth.

He recoils like she really has punched him. “No, never!”

“So how would you know what girls say, let alone what they really mean?”

His lips move for a moment before he manages, “This wasn’t my fault.”

She moves closer to him, slow and crabwise, only bending to pick up her shoes when he steps out of her way and scuttles back to Ari’s bed with them like she’s olly-olly-oxen-freed her way back to home base.

“It was mine,” she says, the same just-the-facts-ma’am way she noted the color of his eyes earlier. Even if he wanted to argue with her, he couldn’t.

Except he kind of does want to argue with her.

**_She_** _kissed **me**_.

If he said it was his fault, would she do it again?

The needle’s looping hiss fills up the space between them.

Instead of putting on her shoes, she drops them on the floor and curls up on Ari’s bed, burying her face in his pillow. She lifts her head just enough to ask, “Put something else on, will you?”

He goes back to the first record, like it might be that easy to take it again from the top, and takes his time setting the needle just right. Big Mama Thornton howls a reproach, just as his dorm room flies open so hard it knocks Ari’s desk chair over.

Galena’s head follows it into the room, almost timidly, immediately turning to the tangle in Ari’s sheets. “Well!”

Nora lifts her head blearily. “I had too much to drink.”

“Oh, honey,” Ari bleats, darting into the room to move the trash can over to his bedside.

“Were you sick?” Galena asks her, but her lamplight eyes are on Nate, wide and shining.

He shakes his head and shrugs, resisting the temptation to rub his lips, check in the mirror if he’s smeared with incriminating war paint. But no…he’s safe. She wiped that off in the bus home, and her perfume’s borrowed from Lena. She’ll think it rubbed off from her skin, not her friend’s.

“Just dizzy,” Nora says, her limbs slow and heavy as she sits up, like she’s been napping the whole time.

Ari finds a bottle of warm Nuka in their bag of contraband. “Get this down your neck. It’ll set you right.”

“I’m not so bad, really. Although, it was a bit touch and go on the way home, when a lush kotzed all over the bus right next to us.”

“Ugh!” Lena shudders, settling in next to her and pulling Nora’s head onto her shoulder, stroking her hair.

“He was outside the bus,” Nate corrects, strangely irked at Nora’s exaggeration.

“Right outside our window,” she tells Galena. “Oh, the glamorous big city!”

“So you only left with Nate because you were feeling peaky,” Galena observes, rather firmly.

“Why’d you two come home early?” Nora asks, instead of biting that hook. “I thought you’d be tripping the light fantastic until dawn.”

Ari pulls a sour face. “Yeah, well, we made it through the Beer Barrel Polka, the Pennsylvania Polka…”

“Hopscotch Polka, Doghouse Polka,” Galena joins in, sighing.

“The Liquorice Stick Polka, the Too Fat Polka…”

“Probably from all the liquorice and beer,” Nate breaks in, sitting on his desk and crossing his legs – carefully. Any action in his pants subsisted the second Nora threatened to wipe out his troops, but there's a low ache in his balls he knows from experience will get a lot worse before it gets better.

“And then we half-stepped outta there,” Ari finishes, leaning over the hifi. His head bobs as he tries to read the spinning label. “This, though…this isn’t half bad. What d’you call it?”

“Actual music,” Nate retorts, with a fraction of the sting he means to sling at him.

Ari turns the little player up as high as it’ll go, snapping his fingers to the beat.

“Hey, hey now,” Nate starts, then remembers the R.A.’s AWOL.

Ari’s head tilts, looking past the hifi. Nate turns to look at what’s caught his attention and barely manages to stifle a gulp when he sees it: two drinks on the desk behind him, chummily close together. Neither of them untouched, but without a lipstick smear on either, you’d hardly know that for sure.

“Want Nora’s?” he offers casually. “She wouldn’t even try any.”

Ari takes the glass, and a long sip later, gives him a smile that’s almost normal. “Well, I’ll give it a good home.”

Nate tries to smile back. “You’re a real humanitarian.”

Ari bobbles his head in a _maybe so, maybe no_ gesture and asks as Big Mama winds down, “What else’ve you got?”

“I’ll dj,” Nora pipes up, pulling Galena off the bed and half-shoving her into Nate’s arms. “You should get some chance to dance tonight.”

“Yeah,” Nate drawls, as Lena giggles and hangs from his neck, then raises her arms in a prim, if wobbly, cotillion pose as Nora plops “Having A Party” back on the little turntable. “I’d hate to miss out on all the fun.”

“Oh, that is pretty,” Lena sighs as the strings kick in, her arm relaxing around Nate's waist.

“Well, you’ve done it now,” Ari says gruffly, joining Nora on his bed by the record player. He tugs a lock of hair loose from her bun, his face serious as he tickles the back of her neck with it until she pushes his hand away.

“What?” Nate asks, finally, dipping Galena so she giggles again, so her view of the other couple’s topsy-turvy.

Ari drains his glass and reaches for the unlabelled jar, adding a slug to Nora’s cola before refilling his own and raising it in a toast, giving Nate’s stomach plenty of time to travel down to the very littlest of his toes.

“You’ve converted us all, comrade." His voice is high and clipped, a Catskills version of old Mao's Hunanese accent. "It is right to rebel! My good fellow traveller, give us another pinko beat to march to, and we will tear down the citadel of capitalist dogs before the dawn!"

"Alright, alright," Nate laughs, swinging Lena back upright.

"Up the workers!" she cheers, and it occurs to Nate that maybe they've all had a little too much to drink.

"Another round of 'shine?" he offers in defiance of common sense, any thought of his 6am ROTC roll call, and even Nora reaches it for it with the hand not setting the needle on “My Big Ten-Inch”.


	5. Chapter 5

By 6:15 the next morning, after he's tried and failed to pass off vomiting in the gym laundry bin as a dose of the flu and started the first of sixty goddamn sets of wind sprints across the quad, he could happily dedicate the rest of his life to inventing a time travel machine just so he could go back and murder Friday-night Nate. An hour later, as they practice breaching techniques, storming the mostly empty academic buildings with unloaded weapons, his mood's improved to merely foul…at least until they hit the library, and he catches a glimpse of Nora.

She barely glances up as he and Ari charge past, humming softly as she adds yearbook stickers into an encyclopedia. She looks fresh as a…only slightly crumpled daisy. Meanwhile, he wouldn't even have made roll call without Ari, who'd been leaning back on him just as hard.

"Your girl must have a hollow leg," he grumbles as they catch their breath, leaning on a fake-marble pillar outside Sedgwick Hall.

"Guess so," is all Ari says before setting off after their squad, and somehow Nate doesn't run into him again until after they've showered up. He waves off Nate's suggestion they hit the Engineering books with a casual "Got to talk to Nora," that doesn’t feel casual at all as it echoes around Nate’s aching skull on his solo trudge back to the dorm.

Galena’s waiting in the lobby, pink-eyed and slouching in a cardigan and last season’s checkered A-line dress – the only item in her wardrobe she can wear without a girdle, he’d wager.

“Feeling that good, huh?”

She rolls her eyes in response, scrawling her name in the log book. “Your after-party cocktails could use some work.”

“I’ll take a bartending elective next semester.” He holds the door open for her. “But it was a good night, right?”

“Yes, Nate.” She stretches until her shoulder pops. “Almost good enough to make the morning after worth it.”

As if she got out of bed while it was still morning.

She hands him a napkin-wrapped parcel from her purse. “I nabbed you a bacon sandwich from the dining hall.”

He tears back the napkin, closing his eyes in bliss at the thick smear of A1 and mayo, just the way he likes it.

“I love you,” he mumbles through a mouthful of greasy meat and cold toast, immediately forgiving the wrinkled nose he gets in response.

“You’d better.”

He ducks inside before her, quickly throwing the worst of last night’s detritus into the trash can and opening the window to clear out the lingering miasma of cigarette and moonshine fumes. She gives it the once-over before stepping in, delicately settling on his bed.

He follows her eyes, but there’s nothing for her to find, he’s sure. Nora took care of that, as if she knew exactly what she was doing.

Not like he had anything to be caught out for, really.

They just had a little too much to drink.

Even she said so.

“So what do you think, we start with those essays or Monday’s calc quiz?”

“Come over here.”

He wraps up the rest of his sandwich for later, wipes his hands on his trousers, and sits next to her. “As you wish, m’lady.”

She rolls her eyes. “Where’s Ari?”

“Out with his girl.”

“Hmm.” She takes off her cardigan, thumbing the ROTC pin that’s stuck through a buttonhole, saving the cashmere from a puncture wound.

“Hmm?” he echoes.

“That’s good.”

“Yeah.” He leans back, rubbing his stomach. It’s not taking to a late breakfast quite as well as he’d like, and they forgot to pick up more alka-seltzer on their bodega raid.

She mirrors his posture, then curls up with her feet tucked under her hem and even hungover, she’s prettier than any pinup.

“You’re gorgeous, you know that?”

“Yes.”

She shows her dimples, looking up at him through her eyelashes.

“I mean, really gorgeous.”

She sighs, her lips tightening into a moue that borders on pouting. “Make a girl do all the work, will you?”

“What?”

She lifts the dress over her head in one smooth flip, and in seconds she’s there on his old striped quilt in just a slip, bra, panties, hose, and stockings – practically naked!

“Oh. Um, okay,” he stammers, leaping to jam a desk chair under the doorknob just in case that schlemiel Ari chooses exactly the worst moment to come home.

“That’s all you’ve got to say?”

Now it’s a full-on pout. And, is he imagining it, or is her hand sliding toward his pillow like a detective about to ransack his hoosegow for contraband?

“I…I’m speechless.”

He picks up the pillow like he only meant to give it a fluff, not show off the complete lack of another lady’s delicate laundry tucked under like a guilty trophy. Then, not knowing what to do with it, he shifts it between his hands before putting it right back in place.

She smiles at the show of nerves, or maybe proof of innocence, and undoes the top button on his shirt.

“Galena, um, you sure about this?”

She undoes another button, then hesitates.

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Definitely.”

Her finger hovers over the next button.

“We don’t have to –”

She yanks his shirt free of his trousers, pulling him close to her. “Claire didn’t come home until dawn’s early light.”

“…oh?”

“She snuck in the window, and when the house mother came by for inspection twenty minutes later, Claire lied right to her face, said she’d come home with us just before curfew and forgot to sign in. And Nora vouched for her, and…”

She sighs. “So did I, of course.”

“And the house mother fell for it?” Nate asks, not sure why Lena looks so upset.

“I don’t think she even cared, really.” She crosses her arms. “She just ticked the box and went on to the next room.”

“That’s good, right?” Nate tries.

With a look of steely determination, she returns to his shirt buttons, undoing the last three in quick succession.

“Lena…”

She pushes the shirt off his shoulders, pressing her cheek against his, and he suddenly doesn’t care so much what she’s got to say.

At least, not until it’s: “Everyone else is having fun. Why can’t I?”

And he can’t even say why that sticks in his craw, when she’s warming up his neck with her breath and her nylon-slick toes are slipping around his ankle and all systems are go, go, go…

“Don’t you mean ‘we’?”

Her long eyelashes flick like a bullwhip. “Am I alone here, Nate?”

“Obviously not,” he snorts, crossing his arms. The lace edging her brassiere snags on his frayed shirt cuff, tugging a tiny nylon loop out of formation. “I just…I thought we had a little more going here than ‘fun’.”

“Of course we do,” she huffs. “I’m _wearing_ your _pin_ , after all.”

“Yeah, but…” He fumbles through the shards of his booze-shattered brain. “You don’t want me. You just, you don’t want to be left out, is all. And I’m here.”

She pulls herself together, stiff on internal scaffolding. “Do you enjoy the view, from up there on your high horse?”

“Yeah,” he huffs in return. “I can see my house from up here.”

She throws her hands up, letting them fall back into her lap with a slap. “After that stunt you an- you pulled last night, you have the gall to –”

“To what?” he interrupts. “What’d I do last night that was so bad, huh?”

_As far as you know, anyway?_

After a heart-freezing moment, his gambit works. She sighs and leans back on his pillow, admitting, “Nothing.”

“We all had a good time!” he insists.

“We did,” she agrees reluctantly. “On my dime, I might add.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

He will never pay her back. Certainly not before his first paycheck of the summer, anyway. His parents won’t let him work while he’s studying, and his semester’s stipend has to last through December.

“It’d be a bit silly to nickel and dime each other, wouldn’t it?” Which she knows. His family’s finances, and their pride, are no secret around the country club. “Given…well. Given the long view of things?”

She’s such a gentle girl, despite her upbringing.

“Honey,” he starts, pausing when his stomach lets off a fortuitously timed gurgle. “I’m too damn hungover to be good company – to appreciate good company. At all. Any other day, well, I’d be the happiest, luckiest fella on campus right now. I’m already kicking myself.”

She picks her dress off the carpet, peeking over her shoulder before she pulls it back over her head. “I must be a sight.”

“Only for sore eyes.”

She bites her lip. “You won’t tell my parents?”

He laughs, or at least that’s the closest description to the noise that all the oxygen fleeing his lungs through the nearest orifice makes. “Why would I do a fool thing like that?”

“Or Lonny?”

He shakes his head. “Lonny would push me in the river for trying to take advantage of his little sister. Your dad would make sure I was wearing cement shoes when it happened. And I don’t even have the imagination to figure in what your mother’d do.”

That makes her smile. “She’d coat you with her ultra-secret sodium-potassium alloy first. Ensure you made a really, really big splash. Will you hold me, at least?”

“What kinda louse wouldn’t?”

She falls asleep on his chest, leaving him to gaze longingly across the room at the remains of his bacon sandwich until it’s congealed beyond the point of edibility, even by his and Ari’s standards.

* * *

Ari’s not back when he walks Galena to her dorm, even with three minutes to go until curfew. The R.A.’s on the phone when he comes back in with the last-minute crowd, only half-counting heads, so Nate quickly scrawls Ari’s name in the book under his own signature. He lingers in the lobby, settling on the saggy couch by the radio like he wants to catch the late news, until the R.A. asks, “Say, where’s your bum of a roommate?”

Nate hooks a thumb at the lobby door. “He went on up.”

The R.A. frowns. “Don’t remember seeing him come in with the rest of you.”

Nate leans closer to the radio. “He’s probably in the shower, if you want to check.”

After a moment, the R.A. settles back on his stool behind the desk. “Nah. Turn up the volume, will ya? Paper said there’d be a big update on Anchorage.”

The paper was wrong – not like he’d be able to hear anything with the white rapids of his pulse battering his eardrums, anyway. He keeps an eye on the door, not sure if he should pray Ari crashes in late, safe and sound but exposing Nate’s fabrication, or stay off wherever he is, out cold in a warm bed or dead in a ditch as it may be. There’s no sign of him, still, when the GNN newsreader signs off at midnight or at 3am when Nate finally pushes his weight-bearing calculation worksheet in a drawer and turns out the light.

He doesn’t get much sleep, though, shaking himself awake every ten minutes expecting to see a cigarette ember in the darkness across the room.

 _Of all the nights to go AWOL_ , he grumbles silently, stomping down on the crocodiles loose in his guts that keep trying to remember that weird look on Ari’s face when he went off to talk to his girl. _For once I could really use a nosey sex maniac’s advice_.

When he’s the only one to show his face in the canteen at breakfast, Nate decides to wash his hands of the whole mess – stop wasting so much of his time trying to mother-hen the whole gang of idiots when he’s got plenty on his own plate! He takes his books to the library, not even caring that it must be Nora’s day off, given the only feminine touch in the whole place is her hag of a boss pecking away at the front desk computer like Hades’ own Girl Friday. He certainly doesn’t care that none of the gang’s in the student union, either, when he takes a late coffee break that he’ll regret come bedtime.

There’s only the gym left to search, and…paydirt. Ari’s back from outer space and beating the snot out of imaginary red chinee infantry hidden in the speed bag, sweat darkening his poly-silk boxing shorts from blue to almost black.

“You looking for me?” he asks in a breathless growl, still bouncing on his toes.

He seems…fine. Nate’s almost disappointed. Not that he really wanted to read in the papers that one of his best buddies washed up under Nordhagen pier like an Eddie Winter lieutenant-turned-stool pigeon, but…it seems like Ari just didn’t feel like hanging out with him.

So much for bonds forged in battle…or ROTC manoeuvres, anyway.

“Nope – Ted.” Nate catches the bag, snatching his hand back just before Ari picks up that brutal rhythm again. “Hey where, uh, where’d you end up, all last night?”

“Took a walk.”

Nate steps back as the bag whifts close to his face. “Oh. Long walk.”

“Well, Ma, if I knew you was worried, I’d have phoned from the cathouse.”

Nate snorts, managing not to shoot back, _Like you need to go off campus for that._ “I covered for you – signed your name while the R.A. was on the horn.”

“Yeah, I saw. Ted’s out back.” Ari jerks his head toward the door to the auditorium, eyes locked on his gloved fists. “Batting cage.”

“Should’ve guessed.”

Nate leaves without asking if their calc cram session is still on. Ari and Ted will tumble in late, or not at all, after they’ve wasted all their energy on old leather and weights. It’s comforting to fall back into the usual routine, he tells himself, retreating through the footfall-swallowing auditorium and outside to the baseball diamond.

Though it is a little funny Ari’s gone all delicate about his sleeping arrangements, now. Nate’d half expected him to commandeer the chalk to the scores board and sketch out a few obscene diagrams, really rub it in. But now that they’re all better friends, maybe Ari feels like he should keep his mouth shut. Or maybe Nora told him to. Maybe she told him…to keep his mouth shut. That’s probably it.

That’s all.

It’s dim in the early autumn twilight, the big lights off to save energy, but three long shadows stretch out from dugout bulb’s amber glow like illustrations in a fairy tale. There’s a ghoul on the bench, flashlight propped on her shoulder, a broad-shouldered marauder waggling a bat by his ear, and a wild forest witch in front of the pitching machine, nearly ripping the seam of her pencil skirt lifting one big ugly saddle shoe, then plants it as the ball flies from her hand fast and true.

Ted swings, air singing as he cleaves it. Aluminum meets leather, right in the sweet spot, and it’s a line drive that’d smash a great big dent into the famous center-field Abraxo ad on the green monster…with Nora’s head right in its path.

Nate gasps, raising his arm in a warning he already knows is too late, but…

Nora steps back, pointing her shoulder at home plate, and the ball shoots past. It ruffles her bangs before socking harmlessly into the net. She plucks another ball from the pitching machine’s basket and squares up, calling softly enough no wayward security guards or delicate deans can overhear, “Once again, Ted: fuck you.”

Claire snorts, eyes briefly leaving the textbook on her knee to smile softly at the Neanderthal she’s now paired up with, apparently, at least until some other creature of the night catches his eye.

“I told you, dollface – mix it up a little!”

“And I told you I’m no pitcher!”

Could’ve fooled Nate. Girl’s got an arm that could’ve kept Milt Pappas in Camden Yards, instead of exiled to the wilds of Cincinnati.

“Ah, c’mon. Gimme a screwball, curveball, _highball_ , anything but the same old four-seam, and I’ll show you what I’m really made of.”

“Oh, me foine bucko, we all know what you’re made of.”

Claire giggles, underlining a sentence in her textbook and scribbling “flesh necrosis!” in the margin. “They’ve been like this for fifteen minutes. Nora’s going to bean him senseless any second now, just you wait.”

“Not before he proofreads my Hawthorn paper.”

“Hey, Nate-o!” Ted lifts his chin at Nora, hiking the bat high again. Too high, really.

“You need to choke up.”

“Choke on this,” Ted sneers cheerfully, then whifts it as Nora throws a wicked slider that dips just inside the strike zone. His whole body corkscrews with wasted momentum, cleats digging little trenches in the tobacco-spattered dirt.

Nate coughs. “Oh, yeah. That’s sticking. Right there, baby, popping the ol’Adam’s apple.”

“Shuddup-a ya face,” Ted laughs, rolling his shoulders.

Nate scoops up the ball and throws it granny-style to Nora. She lets it fly past her shoulder, instead picking another from the basket.

Nate throws her a thumbs-up. “Good hustle!”

She lifts a single finger in response and winds up again, but this pitch goes wild. Ted steps back, letting it bounce off the chin-link fence behind him.

“Boo!” Claire looks over her shoulder before heckling: “We want a pitcher, not a panty snitcher!”

Nate guffaws, mostly in shock at the glimpse of an actual personality from that stack of medical journals wrapped in a cardigan.

“What she said!” Ted kicks the dirt. “Gimme some heat this time, or get back in the kitchen where you belong!”

“Right! Guess I’d better go bake a cake, or something.” Nora drops the ball and brushes off her hands, stalking to pick up the pile of books next to Claire. She detours the long way around the batting cage, like Nate’s taking up the whole path on his side. Which he is _not_.

“Gee.” Claire scoots over like Nora might join her on the girlfriends bench. “That’s what riles you up, after he told you to work the corners like a hoodsie?”

Nora lifts her nose. “It’s the accumulation of insults, not any one in particular.”

“That aimed at me?” Nate tries. “I said sorry.”

He’s pretty sure he said sorry.

Ted’s dropped the bat in the meantime and chased her around the fence, grabbing her shoulders with his giant spidery hands. “Aw, baby, no. I didn’t mean it!”

Nora tries to pull away, but not too hard. Not even when escalates from pawing to a full-on embrace, crushing her books into her chest, right in front of his own girlfriend. Not like that girl’s any help, beaming like a moonstruck gerbil when she should be giving her big dumb ape the business.

“C’mon babe, if you go, I’m stuck with this palooka, and he throws like we’re pitching horseshoes.”

“I do not.” He tries to get a hand under Ted’s iron grip on her arm. “Give her a little breathing room, will ya?”

Nora rests her head on Ted’s shoulder, like they’re dancing. “We’re fine.”

Ted’s shit-eating grin could light up the field.

“But I am leaving.” She twists out of Ted’s grip as easily as she’d pull the rubber band from her bun.

“I’ll walk you back to the dorm,” Nate offers, like the gentleman he is. Unlike _some_.

She sits next to Claire. “I can study here.”

“It’s getting cold,” Claire points out, putting on a big fake shiver.

“I guess you’re right.” Nora blinks up at the sky, like her next move’s going to be written out in the stars.

“Nate-o, Nate-o, Nate-o.” Ted shakes his head. “What’d you do to our girl? Out with it.”

“Nothing!” His voice cracks like he’s coming down with a cold. He probably is, after wearing himself out all weekend, and for what?

Claire looks at her roommate and, after a moment, Nora echoes: “Nothing.”

Claire raises an eyebrow.

Nora shrugs.

“So if everything’s fine, you’re not leaving me to choose between a busted pitching machine and Brushback Billy here.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Nate asks, just to get ahead of any disagreement Nora might throw out.

“You’re the engineer,” Ted scoffs. “You tell me. And you, Lady Monbouquette, get your hiney back on the mound while I’m still warmed up!”

Nora sighs, but sets her books back down. “Five minutes. Not a second more.”

Claire shivers again. “Same goes for me, Teddy. It really is freezing out here.”

“Can’t argue with that.” Ted picks up the bat and pretends to swing on Nora as she slips past. “No fella wants a frigid galpal, hey?”

Nat groans, but the girls only giggle again, Claire throwing in an airy _Oh you!_ for good measure.

“Fuck you, Ted,” he mutters under his breath, finding a tool box in one of the dugout lockers. The tools inside are rusty but just about serviceable.

Nora stiffens as he pops a squat behind her and pries the casing from the pitching machine, her next pitch skimming the brim of Ted’s cap.

“You throw like a girl!” he yells, lofting it back to her.

She lets that remark pass, too, returning only with a good ol’ four-seam that, this time, Ted hits well over her head.

“Why the hell – why do some guys get to say and do whatever they want, when the rest of us get our heads snapped off if we don’t stick to every single rule?”

The whine in his voice is louder than an air-raid siren, and he wishes he could take it back even before Nora snickers as she throws, putting a little wobble in her fastball.

“Yes, you’re quite the docile sheep, Mr. Freis.” She crouches to scoop up the grounder Ted returns.

“How many times do I have to say I’m sorry?” He glares at the pitching machine's innards like they’ve offended him, when the problem turns out to be nothing more fancy than too much oil on the smaller gears, all gunked up with batting-cage grit.

“Once would be nice.”

He answers with a roll of his eyes and pries the offending gears away from their shafts with a flathead screwdriver.

She shifts the ball to her left hand and flings it at Ted, another wobbler but well inside the strike zone when he swings and misses.

“Cheater!” Ted yells, squaring up again.

“Anyway, you said it was your fault.” Nate shivers as a gust of ocean-chilled wind cuts right through his coat, but the other three don’t even zip up their jackets. Damn Yankees. “You were drunk.”

“I’m not having this conversation again, Mr Freis.”

“Ah, knock off that ‘Mr. Freis’ crapola. Whatever…happened...we’re still pals. Right?” He shakes out his handkerchief, glad it’s not his good one, and starts wiping the gritty gunk out of the gear’s teeth.

“We were pals?” She sniffs, but he’s charitable and thinks maybe it’s the cold making her nose run.

“What would you call us?”

She sniffs again. “Colleagues. At best.”

“Get off it,” he laughs. “None of us’ve got colleagues. Pah! Ari put you up to that?”

She doesn’t answer.

Oh, hit on a nerve, did he? “Or is Ari a ‘colleague’ too?”

She plucks another ball from the machine, putting the big chunk of dead metal between them before she answers. “We’ve ended our attachment.”

“You guys had an attachment to break up?” he snipes back, and then remembers that speed bag, getting beat to hell and back.

 _Poor guy_.

 _Wait_.

“Who dumped who?”

She steps in front of him, her face shielded by a curtain of snarls that’ve come loose from her bun. “It was a mutual decision.”

“Yeah, that’s what the dumpee always says.”

“Believe whatever you want.”

He jostles a wrench on his palm, feeling its heft. “This…this about Friday night? Does he know about…about that?”

She pushes her hair back, giving him a sharp look around the ball in her hand and half-whispering, “There’s nothing to know about.”

“Like hell there’s…” He drops the wrench back in the toolbox and picks up another gear. “There damn near was plenty.”

She raises her voice again. “Ari’s a lovely fellow, but neither of us can afford the…the time away from our studies that going steady inevitably requires.”

“Uh huh. And am I going to find a rattlesnake in my bed tonight?”

“Only if reptiles are your fetis–” She presses her lips together on heels of the word and winds up too quickly, throwing a haymaker that Ted hits into the net on his right.

“Foul!” Claire laughs from behind him. “C’mon, pitcher!”

“There’s nothing for Ari to know and even if there was, he wouldn’t,” she whispers through the grim grey-lipped slit under her nose.

“So why’d he dump you, then?”

“I’d expect this from Ted, but you? You don’t understand?” She shakes her head and then, slow and careful like he’s deaf or an idiot, lays it out. “Losing a perfect GPA over some fella? I’m not letting it happen again. Not when I won’t get another shot at this.”

“If you say so.” He knocks the gears back on their shafts and gives the big one a spin – or tries to. Even clean, they don’t budge; there’s a bigger problem somewhere in the machine’s guts, something he can’t even try to fix without more light. “Like your sheets will even get a chance to cool down, anyway, before you’ve drafted another soldier to march all over ‘em.”

He stands, ready to dance back from her fist, but she just picks up another ball. “He says, like a boy definitely not desperate to punch his WD-AGO.”

He decides not to point out that, as an ROTC student, his enlistment card is not only punched but filed in the Annapolis recruiter’s A-1 officer candidates program. “I’m your pal, no matter what you say. You want to get a coffee and tell me all about it?”

She sighs and scratches her forehead with the rough stitches of the ball. “Why?”

“Like last time you two were in a little rough patch, remember? Didn’t it help to talk about it?”

“No!” She laughs, shaking her head again, but there’s no smile in her voice when she orders: “Leave me alone, Nate. I mean it.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

He laughs back at her. “You sound so serious.”

“I am!”

“But you’re still talking to me.”

She takes a deep breath. “And you – should not – be talking – to me.”

Her hair’s all frizzed up and tinted orange in the dugout light, like sparks flung up from an old combustion engine. And if glares were gasoline, he’d be the one in flames. Unlike the Romans in old Londinium, though…he’s not one to retreat. “So stop talking to me! Go on, walk away. I’m waiting.”

“These are my friends,” she insists, nostrils flaring clear off her face. “You walk away.”

He shakes the oily grit out of his handkerchief and stands. Even with the pitcher between them, she’s got to lift her chin to scowl at him. It makes her look even more like a haughty parrot knocked off its high perch.

“You’re my friend, too. Who’s kept you from failing out of calc, huh?”

“Me!” She takes a deep breath and thumps the pitching machine, like that might get it chugging again. He’s not dumb enough to think she’s picturing anything but his face in its flaky red paint, but it’s still cute as hell. “And maybe your girlfriend. You remember her?”

“Well, yeah, I –”

“Go pester her.” She lifts her fist again, but business-like this time, higher than the pitching machine’s ball cage.

“I don’t want to pester her.” And he’s just saying it to get her goat, stalling for the half-second it’ll take for his brain to kick up a killer comeback, but still, he sees what Nora tells him to. The perfect life rolling out ahead of them. Lena…his pretty wife on the lawn, sipping a highball, silk slippers tucked under the wicker chair. Sleek little seal-children in matching bathing suits on the dock, dangling their toes in the water while he ties chicken thighs in wire crab traps, shows them how to toss them out so they’ll sink straight to the bottom. Just like his parents, just like her parents, world without end, amen. “I want to pester you.”

“No!” Her voice carries across the field. “You don’t!”

“Hey, keep it down –”

“You don’t give a shit about me.”

“I do!”

“I’m just –” Her hands flutter like she’ll pluck the word from the wind. “A novelty. Someone you’d never meet in your country club, unless they were unclogging the toilet. And then you wouldn’t even meet them. You’d barely notice the – the servant tugging their forelock to you as you grumbled to the world at large you’ll have to walk up a whole flight of stairs to grace a different porcelain god with your ass.”

“I can unclog my own toilet, thank you very much!” He pushes her hand down when it clenches up again. “And where do you get off –”

“Whenever and with whoever I please, according to you,” she snorts, pulling away from his touch. “And I don’t even have the class to be ashamed of it.”

“I’m not saying you…” He lowers his voice. “Sure, everyone does it, but they don’t…they don’t talk about it.”

She smiles coldly. “Apparently, we move in very different social circles, Mr Fries.”

“Well, not like you do,” he tries again. “It’s different when you’re…when it’s not going anywhere.”

“I am – going somewhere, I mean,” she volleys back. “No matter what Professor Mercer and all the rest of them expect. I won’t go back to Springfield and work for Pop, have three kids with a husband who calls it a ‘terlet’ before I’m twenty-five, and vent any spark not snuffed out of me by perfectly levitating lettuce in gelatin molds.”

“Wow. If this is what you think of your parents…” He rolls his eyes. “We have got to take a safari trip by your house sometime. I’ll bring a great big bag of peanuts to distract them, so they don’t scratch up the car’s paint job.”

She digs her toe in the turf, scraping off streaks of white shoe polish. “I’m not ashamed of Mom and Pop – they work their asses off, if you want to know the truth. No sabbaticals. No fancy charity dinners.”

“Aw…fuck you, Miss Esposito.” He’s never said that to anyone and meant it, let alone a girl, but damn if it doesn’t feel good. “My parents work every waking hour, just as hard as yours.”

“With the kind of people they can phone up and trade in some favors, should their sweet baby boy not – quite – make the grade.”

“That’s not true,” he snaps. “I had to work just as hard to get here, and stay here, as you.”

“I know – you’re not allowed to play baseball, you poor thing.” She pops her eyes in a parody of shock. “Imagine if you had to work to cover your board!”

 _Ouch_.

“I’ve got ROTC. And a summer job lined up.” It’s weak even to his own ears. “And…”

“And a rich girlfriend to fall back on. Well caught.” She drops one eyelid in a sardonic wink. “Although, you do realise, it’s usually the girl who’s here for an MRS degree?”

He raises his own fist, but not very high, and replies carefully. “If you were a fella, I’d pop you right in the nose for that.”

“Now hold on!” Ted yells from very, very far away, but Nate’s watching her, the fire in her eyes and sudden firm set of her hips.

She opens her mouth, but he talks over her fast. “If you were a fella, _and_ I wasn’t certain you’d punch me back twice as hard.”

Her bark of a laugh stops Ted in his tracks, halfway to the pitcher’s plate.

“Maybe I earned that,” she murmurs, shaking her head – not at Nate, but at her roommate, who’s got a grip on that flashlight like she might pitch it at him.

Nate presses his advantage. “I was a beast. Let me buy you that coffee – make it up to you.”

She sighs. “No, Nate. No coffee. No talking. I – I think I could use a break from the whole study group, actually.”

“How about you two cool it, huh?” Ted interjects, tapping the bat on his cleats. “What’s worth getting so worked up about?”

“Certainly not me.” Nora tosses him the ball, with a smile that could frost all the grass on the infield. “C’mon, Claire. I’ve got the late shift in the library – we can work there.”

“Now, see here,” Nate starts, but she walks ahead like no one else’s on the field. Her roommate shoots him an evil eye that, with a few years’ practice and maybe a Hopkins internship, will completely negate any medical need for general anaesthetic. For now, though, all it does is make his ears ring and – he squints – maybe knocks him a little blind in his left eye. Mollified by his stunned silence, she pecks Ted’s cheek and races after Nora, flashlight bobbing like a will-o-wisp in the grass.

“These Masshole broads,” Nate mutters to himself, stretching out his pitching arm. “Gimme a nice simple Bay girl any day of the week.”

“You’re one to talk,” Ted calls back.

“You couldn’t hear that,” Nate scoffs.

Ted swings low at an imaginary slider and then – just like Nate suggested – chokes up on the bat. “Yeah, well, I can guess pretty well what you’re grumbling about.”

“Like you understand women.”

“Used to think I did,” Ted nods. “Until I saw that famed Freis charm in action. Wow-ee!”

He twists up on his toes to avoid a splitter to the breadbasket. “Dead ball! That’d be me on first.”

“Ah, you’re crowding the plate.” Nate picks out another ball. “Give me some room to work, here.”

Ted plants himself on home base, instead. “You’re a menace, Nathaniel Freis.”

“It’s just Nathan.” He rolls his shoulder again. “Let me get warmed up. And step off the plate, will ya?”

“I don’t mean your pitching – well, not just your pitching.” Ted scuffs his cleats on the base, not budging an inch.

“Hah, hah. I made varsity junior year, for your infor–”

“So, your whole team stank, so what?”

Nate blinks. “What’s your problem, buddy?”

“You – this!” Ted hooks a thumb at the empty bench behind him. “You show up, everyone else vamooses.”

“They’re all just…busy,” Nate shoots back, trailing off when he can’t come up with a better excuse.

“We had a good thing going, the whole gang, you know? I hardly had to work at all.” Ted shivers and swings the bat a few times. “And now without Nora and Claire and Ari, I’ve got help with, what, just lit and calc – and no calc, neither, as soon as Lena twigs onto your game, too.”

“What – what game?” Not waiting for an answer, Nate lifts winds up for another fastball. “That some kinda threat?”

Ted jumps back and connects with this one, aluminium singing as the ball whuffs into the net behind Nate. “Doesn’t seem like you need any help screwing this pooch.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong.”

_She said it was her fault._

“Then what’s got Nora’s back up, huh?”

“Nothing I did!”

“So what, she’s just mad at the world?”

Nate laughs. “Have you met her?”

“Yeah, she’s a nice girl. Good head on her shoulders.” Ted wrinkles his nose. “Maybe her taste in fellas could be better.”

“Well now’s your chance to add her to your line-up,” Nate sneers. “Better hurry, though. I doubt her dance card stays empty for long.”

“See,” Ted winces, shouldering the bat. “That’s the kinda statement that pisses a lady off.”

“She’s not here to hear it. Unless you –”

“Oh, I’m definitely telling her.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Hey, if they’re gonna reform as the ‘We Hate Nate’ study group, I’m jumping in on the ground floor – no offense. You’re not taking any of my classes next semester, but Nora’s in three. I’ll need her big juicy brain more than your mid-Atlantic bonhomie.”

“No one hates me!” Nate tosses the ball over his head, catching it with a white-knuckled grip. “Maybe we had a misunderstanding. But I said I was sorry and she said I didn’t have to be and that was the end of it. There’s definitely nothing Lena needs to know.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah!”

Ted scratches his ear. “Maybe you’d better just leave her alone, like she said. And then everything will cool off and we’ll be back to normal next semester.”

“Fine!” Nate flings the ball back into its bin. “I’ll go apologise, if that’s what it takes to make you happy.”

“That’s not…ah, forget it.”


End file.
